


The Sphynx and the Hare

by darkbluebox



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon with a twist, M/M, daemon-related angst, knowledge of his dark materials is helpful but not mandatory, sorry folks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:07:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 21
Words: 41,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21726496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkbluebox/pseuds/darkbluebox
Summary: Neil knows he should burn Wymack's contract and run until his legs can no longer carry him. His daemon, the mouthpiece to his soul, says otherwise. He's ignored her for far too long; it's time to follow his heart, be it to dream or damnation.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 268
Kudos: 487





	1. Tastes like Damnation

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for canon-typical content.

Neil looks at the contract Coach Wymack is holding out for him like a starving man might look at a three-course dinner that’s almost certainly poisoned. Fìrinn, tucked under his hoodie, twitches and pokes her nose through the gap at his neck. “We could keep playing Exy. On a _college_ team,” she whispers and for a moment Neil wants it so badly he thinks he might die from it.

Then reality floods back in. He shakes his head, wraps his arms across his chest to pull her closer against him and steps back. “No,” he says, to himself as much as Wymack. Wymack’s daemon, a black and white Pitbull terrier, blinks. She’s done nothing but stand unobtrusively at Wymack’s side since they arrived, but her steady gaze is setting Neil on edge more than her human’s presence.

Wymack tries to press the contract into his hands again, but the reaction is instinctive. Neil turns and runs.

He makes it three corridors before he’s forced to a stop. There’s another daemon between him and the emergency exit, one of those weird hairless cats. Its eyes are large and round and pale gold, fixed upon him. Waiting for him. Fìrinn shivers against his chest. “Go. Run.”

Neil shakes his head. “Where’s their human?” A thousand warning alarms are screaming in his mind so loudly that it’s a struggle to think. He needs to go, to leave, to run-

A racquet collides with Neil’s stomach, hitting Fìrinn square on. Neil falls to his knees and doubles over, his scream in perfect tandem with his daemon’s. His assailant was likely looking to wind him and hadn’t counted on Neil having his daemon stuffed inside his hoodie. A human making any kind of direct attack against another’s daemon was a horrendous taboo, unbroken even in warzones. His father’s men had never laid a hand upon Fìrinn in their half-a-dozen skirmishes over the years, although likely only because Neil’s mother had never given them the chance. Bile rises in his throat as he remembers the last time someone touched Fìrinn; the agonising pressure of his father’s meaty fist wrapping around her neck as he dangled her over Neil’s head. His father had never carried much respect for that particular taboo.

“Goddammit, Minyard, this is why we can’t have nice things,” says Wymack’s voice over the ringing in Neil’s ears.

“Unforeseen circumstances, Coach. What kind of idiot keeps their daemon under their jumper?” a cold, lilting voice replies. 

Neil sucks in a lungful of air that burns like ice as Fìrinn wriggles out from under the hem of his hoodie. She takes a few wobbly steps forward only to be met by the sphynx cat towering over her. Neil squints upwards until the black spots draw back from his eyesight to reveal her human. The unmistakable hazel eyes of Andrew Minyard meet his unflinchingly.

He holds two fingers to his forehead in a mocking salute, his lips twitching into a sickening grin under the effect of his court-mandated medication. His daemon stands in sharp contrast to him, still and silent as a monolith, unaffected by her human’s high. It takes him a moment to recall the daemon’s name; the news articles had been far more interested in reporting on the activities of her infamous human. Then it comes to him: Lexia.

Fìrinn makes the mistake of trying to dart past her. A moment later Lexia has her pinned. Neil gags, feeling the claws pressed to her neck as though they were digging into his own.

“Manners,” Andrew says lightly.

Wymack takes a step forward, cursing, and so does his daemon, and Lexia lets go.

Neil takes another deep breath and scoops Fìrinn back into the safety of his arms before climbing to his feet.

“A rabbit daemon. Appropriate for the fastest striker in the whole district,” says another voice. Fìrinn jerks so violently in his arms that he almost drops her.

Neil turns despite Fìrinn’s warning hiss. Kevin Day, _the_ Kevin Day, is standing before him. At his side is Caith, his Doberman daemon, standing tall and looking down her nose at the scene before her.

Underneath the thrum of terror twitching through Fìrinn’s limbs Neil can feel a stab of irritation. She isn’t a rabbit but a hare, but it’s a common mistake Neil stopped bothering to correct. It works in his favour for her to be mislabelled.

He often wishes she had settled as a moth or a spider, something small and easily concealed. His mother’s daemon had been a viper which mostly stayed hidden in her sleeve, hissing sharp warnings or instructions to the both of them whenever they were out in public. He can change his appearance with every new identity as easily as a snake shedding skin, but Fìrinn will always be a hare, and there’s only so many ways to keep her covered without drawing suspicion. Curled up under his baggy jumper is one of their less elegant solutions, odd enough to attract some looks but not completely unheard of. Sometimes he’ll carry her in his bag pack, which he leaves partly unzipped so she can stick her head through the opening to watch for pursuers. Most people would leave a daemon her size to walk alongside them, but most people don’t have to be constantly on guard against attack like Neil is. Of all the options he prefers having her against his chest by far, comforted by the proximity even if it isn’t the most practical solution.

She stays quiet in his arms as they make their pitch to him, eyes darting from one man to the next. Her gaze stays on Wymack’s daemon the longest; his father’s daemon was a dog too, a little smaller, but the similarity is enough to set him on edge.

When his players are done with Neil, Wymack dismisses them, waiting until they leave to make his final pitch. Kevin and his daemon stalk past Neil as though he’s beneath their notice, and while Andrew breezes past with similar distain his daemon pauses at Neil’s feet. She hasn’t blinked in the entirety of the conversation.

Fìrinn twitches traitorously again in Neil’s arms as they stare at each other. 

At last Lexia flicks her tail disinterestedly and follows her human through the open door left behind him.

Wymack pushes the contract towards Neil once again. “Your graduation ceremony is May eleventh, according to your coach We'll have someone pick you up from Upstate Regional Airport Friday the twelfth."

“No,” Neil says. And at the same moment, from the daemon nestled in his arms, comes a steady, sure, but most importantly louder, “Yes.” Neil freezes, stares at Fìrinn like he can’t believe it was her voice.

Wymack’s daemon lets out a huff of surprise as he raises an eyebrow. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

There’s a short silence. Despite every instinct telling him otherwise, Neil doesn’t correct him. Fìrinn shivers, but Neil can no longer tell if it’s from terror or excitement.

Wymack nods, marking the end of the conversation, and turns to leave. “Welcome to the line,” his daemon adds in a quiet voice far gentler than her human’s. The door swings shut behind them, leaving Neil with nothing but the silent scream of his own thoughts.

Fìrinn jumps from his arms as Neil stumbles into the bathroom, stands at his back as he gags into the toilet bowl. The hiss of his mother’s daemon muddles and merges with her own panicked orders in his ears until his throat and ears are burning. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“University,” says Fìrinn. Then, with growing confidence, “We _can,_ ” in a tone Neil almost doesn’t recognise.

It’s hope. It sounds like a dream; it tastes like damnation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Neil's hare: Fìrinn: Scottish Gaelic. Truth  
> Andrew's Sphynx cat: Lexia: Corruption of Alexis. German. Helper, defender.  
> Kevin's Doberman: Caith: Corruption of Cath. Irish. Fight, battle.
> 
> I realise this AU is a little out there but I couldn't drop the idea until I wrote something for it. I've no idea how widespread knowledge is of the HDM universe is - would a post setting out the basic rules/system for daemons be of help to anyone? Let me know if so.
> 
> As always, please hit me with those sweet sweet comments.


	2. Better Luck Next Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil arrives at PSU.

Aaron is waiting for Neil in the airport car park, leaning against ridiculously expensive black car as he greets him with a scowl. He doesn’t bother to introduce himself as Neil climbs into the passenger seat, and a quick scan for any sign of Aaron’s daemon comes up empty. Presumably she’s hidden somewhere in the folds of Aaron’s clothes, although Neil doubts it’s because Aaron is shy. Neil is hardly in a position to judge. He keeps Fìrinn in his arms or within arm’s reach everywhere save court, and if Fìrinn were as small as Aaron’s daemon must be, she would be hiding too. Neil doesn’t bother asking, not out of any sense of social decorum but because there’s little point learning about the members of his team when he’s going to be staying for so little time. They may as well be ghosts to him.

“Do you always carry her like that? It’s weird.” Aaron takes his eyes from the road to look at Fìrinn, who is buried under Neil’s loose-fitting hoodie.

“Guess you’ll have to wait and see,” Neil replies snippily.

“I hope she likes the smell of dollar-store deodorant.”

Neil doesn’t dignify the statement with a response, quietly extending one hand to grip the handle embedded in the car door as Aaron swerves through traffic like a man on a suicide mission.

He knows the arrangement is odd at the best of times, downright ridiculous and impractical at the worst, but it’s the closest he can feel to safe when he’s out in public. It’s not like he can leave Fìrinn in a locker while he goes about his daily business; trying to move separately from her would be akin to ripping his own arm off. It’s a game every child plays on slow days in the playground; see how many steps they can take from their daemon before the pain became too much to bear and their daemon rushes back into their arms. Neil never understood the other children’s urge to test their limits in such a way; he grew up ingrained with the knowledge that he had to keep what mattered close to his chest in every sense. As a result, his range is less than the average; while most daemons can wander the distance of a room or more from their human, every moment without the rapid tap of Fìrinn’s heartbeat against his chest feels like a weight crushing him to the ground. If he had ever attempted the childish test, Neil firmly believes he would have been dead before he made it ten steps.

The rest of the ride passes with Aaron not-so-subtly probing him about Kevin, Neil’s skill as a player and his personal history. Neil is forthcoming enough on the first two counts that he hopes he has deflected attention away from his hesitance concerning the latter.

Three people are waiting for them as the car rolls up to the sidewalk. Neil retrieves his duffel from the backseat while Aaron slides around to the back of the car to pop open the trunk. When Neil joins him and his brother at the kerb, there’s no sign that he has taken anything from the trunk.

Neil frowns, but is quickly distracted by his welcome party. A man with an excitable chipmunk daemon darting around his ankles steps forward and introduces himself as Nicky Hemmick. Neil hesitantly places Fìrinn between his feet so he can accept the hand offered to him. Fìrinn shrinks back between Neil’s legs as Nicky’s daemon, Eleadora, scampers inquisitively towards her. She skitters to a stop at the barrier of Neil’s legs; it’s as much a taboo for a daemon to touch another human as it is a human to touch another daemon.

Kevin and the twins attempt no similar pleasantries. The twins are dressed identically, distinguishable by expression, one bored and the other irritable, and the presence of Lexia several feet behind Andrew. Kevin and Caith, side-by-side, simply glower.

They lead him into the elevator to Wymack’s floor in silence. Fìrinn nudges Neil’s calf in a silent request to be lifted and Neil is happy to do so, rescuing her from her place between the insatiable curiosity of Nicky’s daemon and the stoic glare of Andrew’s.

It’s as he straightens that the flat line of Aaron’s pockets catches Neil’s eye. He had been carrying a packet of cigarettes when they were at the airport. He could have deposited them in the trunk of the car when he had opened it, but why?

“Neil,” Fìrinn says quietly. Not quietly enough; Neil catches Nicky’s glance as his eyes are drawn to Fìrinn, and his grip on her tightens.

Fìrinn rarely speaks in earshot of other humans. Neil can switch accents at will; Fìrinn still has the dregs of Nathan’s accent mixed up with his mother’s British lilt. It isn’t unheard of for a daemon to have a different accent from their human – humans are creatures of growth and change, but the daemon, their centre, their soul, does not evolve so easily. Fìrinn can’t change her accent any more easily than Neil can change the voice in his head. They are more or less the same thing, after all.

Luckily, daemons don’t often address other humans directly without reason.

“I know,” Neil murmurs to her as they arrive at the door to Wymack’s apartment. He’s still turning over the impossible packet of cigarettes in his mind like a rubix cube, doesn’t realise that’s not what Fìrinn is trying to warn him of.

“No,” she whispers urgently as the door clicks open. Her panic rushes through Neil all at once in a silent, deadly tsunami, locking his limbs into place as he realises that he will be spending the coming months living on a grown man’s couch. The last man he’d lived with was his father, and the rush of memories which accompany that thought are enough to bring Neil to a halt in the doorway. Fìrinn scrabbles from Neil’s arms and back to the floor, propelling herself backwards from the doorway until she crashes into Andrew’s daemon behind her. Lexia’s claws are quick to slice at the back of her head as she shoves Neil’s daemon away. The pain is enough to jolt Neil back to the present. He darts forwards into the apartment but it’s too late; his panic has been noticed.

He pretends to study the living room with forced nonchalance which is nearly shattered by the German conversation the group strikes up around him. The cousins bicker, speculate, and confirm Neil’s theory. Somehow, Andrew had been the one to collect him at the airport.

But Lexia hadn’t been in the car; Neil had been riding shotgun, and he had seen the backseat when he threw his duffle behind his seat. Lexia is small, but not small enough to hide in any of the spaces offered by the car’s interior. That only leaves-

The sound of the trunk slamming shut echoes in Neil’s memory. The idea is absurd at best, repulsive at worst, but he has no better theory; Andrew had shut his daemon in the trunk, letting her out and swapping places with his brother while Neil was distracted collecting his duffel. He looks to Fìrinn, who has climbed onto a ring-soaked coffee table for a better vantage point. She has come to the same conclusion, judging by the way her gaze follows Lexia around the room.

Such treatment of one’s daemon isn’t an act of outright cruelty or self-harm, not in the traditional sense. It’s just… the closest comparison Neil can think of is if Andrew had removed all his clothes and shut them in the trunk before getting behind the wheel. Uncomfortable, awkward, unnecessary and a serious breach of etiquette, if only towards himself. Surely the chance to quiz Neil without Neil’s knowledge couldn’t have been worth the discomfort.

If Lexia is affected by the ordeal, she shows no sign of it. She seems to prefer to wander the room as though completely independent of her human, ducking beneath low furniture and swatting disinterestedly at the dustbunnies beneath Wymack’s battered couch.

Fìrinn’s eyes are on Andrew’s daemon, but her ears twitch as she follows the German passing back and forth over her head. Neil hates the tell, hates how easy she is to read. It’s another reason to keep her hidden from view, but her movements have already attracted enough attention from the cousins, so he leaves her to her own devices as much as he can bear it. 

Kevin and Andrew disappear into the depths of Wymack’s apartment, presumably to wreak as much havoc as they can get away with. Neil sinks into the couch as Nicky gossips, whether directed at him or at no one in particular it’s hard to say. Neil closes his eyes as Fìrinn climbs into his lap, running a hand automatically across her back. When he opens them, Lexia is on the coffee table before him. She seems more interested in surveying Neil than in following her human into the next room.

Neil’s patience with the daemon’s behaviour snaps. “Does coach know Andrew’s off his meds?”

She gives no reaction other than the continued twitch of her tail, golden eyes steady and unblinking. Andrew appears in the doorway a second later, the sound of his approach covered by Nicky and his daemon’s identical squeaks of surprise.

“Am I crazy?” exclaims Eleadora in German at the same time as Nicky says, “Did we just see that happen?”

His answer, when it comes, is from Andrew. Neil hasn’t heard Lexia speak at all in the brief time he has spent with Andrew. Maybe he doesn’t trust her to speak while he’s in his drugged state; perhaps his daemon isn’t as unaffected by the meds as appearances suggest. “Smarter than you look, aren’t you?”

Neil taps two fingers to his temple in an imitation of Andrew’s mocking salute. “Better luck next time.”

This time it’s Lexia’s turn to react, blinking slowly as she tilts her head to one side. That she reacts at all feels like a hard-won victory.

"Oh," Andrew says. "Oh, you might actually turn out to be interesting. For a little while, at least. I don't think the amusement will last. It never does."

Fìrinn rises suddenly onto her hind legs, eyes narrowed at Andrew. "Don't mess with us."

Neil’s fingers catch in her fur. For a moment it reminds him too much of his mother’s harsh grip on his hair, and he forces his hands to relax as he slides them behind his back instead.

“Or what?” Andrew’s eyes, for the first time, follow the line of his daemon’s gaze to fix upon Fìrinn. Neil expects her to freeze in the spotlight. Instead, her ears flick in a warning.

Before any of them can say anything else, the rattle of the doorknob announces Wymack’s arrival.

“I’m sorry,” Fìrinn whispers in Neil’s ear once the others are distracted. “I don’t know what came-”

“I understand. I felt it too.” Neil glances towards Andrew, who is pretending without success that he hadn’t been pilfering Wymack’s liquor cabinet mere moments ago. Lexia has vanished from the coffee table, although she has not, Neil notes, chosen to join Andrew at his side. “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”

Fìrinn knows when he is lying to her; it’s as futile as lying to himself. In a rare act of kindness, however, she lets it slide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicky's chipmunk: Eleadora: Corruption of Eleodoro. Spanish. Gift from the Sun.
> 
> I swear I am not rewriting the entire trilogy, it just happened that chapter two of TFC had some Quality Content.
> 
> Make my Christmas and drop me a comment xxx


	3. Not Okay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil meets the Foxes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for violence, scars, ableist slur, reference to assault

Just when Neil thinks his medical exam is finished, Abby turns back to him and tells him to remove his shirt.

Fìrinn, nestled beneath it, claws at Neil’s chest like she’s trying to dig straight through it. He’s sure the scrape of her claws will leave trails of scratch marks raised in red welts across his torso, but it won’t be enough to distract Abby from the wasteland of injuries across his chest.

Neil shakes his head and crosses his arms tightly, skin prickling under her scrutiny.

Abby’s daemon, a speckled brown sparrowhawk named Heimo, shuffles from foot to foot on her desk, shifting papers around as he does so. “Let us help you, Neil.”

Neil shoots him a harassed look. Abby quickly intervenes. “We can’t help you if you can’t help us,” she clarifies. “Tell us why you can’t take off your shirt.”

With Fìrinn’s low, panicked objections whispered in one ear and his mother’s voice in the other, Neil fumbles for an excuse and comes up blank.

Since arriving at Palmetto he has made one sacrifice after another to make it onto the Court, and this is just another. He tells himself that despite the frantic tug of Fìrinn’s fear muddled up in his discomfort.

He had known from the moment he had set eyes on the Foxhole Court that he was doomed; Fìrinn leapt from his arms and dashed ahead of him as soon as they entered the bright orange arena, claws skittering against the floor in her eagerness. Neil had no other option but to follow her up to the glass court doors, pressing his face up against the plexiglass like a child outside a candy store until his breath misted up the glass. Fìrinn shook with excitement at his side.

“I can’t play here,” Neil said, mouth dry, taking in the endless rows of seats and the gleaming wooden panelling.

“I want to,” Fìrinn replied at his side. “More than anything.”

“More than life?” Neil said archly. They both knew all too well the danger, and Neil had long surrendered himself to it. All the same, there was still part of him that resented Fìrinn’s passion, the call of his soul as it lead him to damnation like a siren-call.

“This _is_ life,” she replied, her sincerity as heavy as stone.

"Oh," Nicky said, leaning against the wall a short way down from Neil. "No wonder he chose you."

Neil had expected the high of the Foxhole Court would wear off in the days and weeks that followed, but it does not. He’s been spending every moment since his arrival chasing that feeling like his life depends on it, even though it’s more likely by far to be what ends it. When Neil dies, he fully intends to go out with a racket in his hand.

But before he can take his place amongst the foxes, he has to take off his shirt.

“I’m not okay,” he tells Abby by way of warning, hating how small the words sound.

Fìrinn won’t be persuaded out, so he works around her, stripping his layers away sharply despite both of their misgivings. As soon as the last layer of protection is gone, she darts around his back, using Neil’s body as a shield from Abby’s line of sight. It’s an unnecessary precaution; both Abby and her daemon are distracted by the path of destruction that is Neil’s torso.

Abby looks as though she’s trying to keep her promise not to pry, teeth digging into her bottom lip. It’s her daemon’s will that breaks in the face of Neil’s scars. Heimo hops from her desk and onto the bench Neil is sitting on, looking between him and his daemon. “Neil…” he begins. Neil and Fìrinn flinch back from him in unison, and he doesn’t continue.

Fìrinn’s patience snaps. “We’re done,” she announces sharply. Hearing no disagreement from Abby, Neil pulls his shirt back on like the exposure is burning him.

They’re both still feeling raw and over-exposed when it’s time to meet the first of the incoming Foxes, like a layer of Neil’s skin has been sanded off by Abby’s gaze. Fìrinn stays zipped in Neil’s bag pack while he meets Matt, the tip of her nose twitching through the gap but emerging no further despite the clear interest of Matt’s daemon. Reynala, a brown river otter, trips over her own feet in her excitement to be introduced.

His introduction to Dan and Renee does not pass so smoothly.

Someone has been through Neil’s folder while it was left unattended in his room. Fìrinn leads the charge to Andrew’s dorm, out for blood. The conversation with Kevin that follows is short and vicious. Caith’s ears prick up at the sound of Neil’s jagged French, at first in curiosity, then anger.

“Put a leash on your pet monster or I will,” Neil says, impervious to Caith’s growing temper.

“A frightened child like you?” Kevin snarls.

Caith barks something in Japanese that sounds like an insult.

“Fuck you, cripple,” Neil snaps. Kevin turns white, and Caith jumps to attention at his side.

“What did you call me?” The look on Kevin’s face is almost enough to scare Neil off, but before he can retreat, Fìrinn pipes up for him. A moment ago she was hiding behind his legs, but now she’s standing tall, eyes narrowed.

“We called you a deadweight has-been,” she says with fire Neil didn’t think was in him.

Caith springs forwards with a livid yelp, and Kevin is right behind her.

Hares may be known for speed, but even Neil and his daemon can’t make it further than the hallway before Caith snaps her jaws around Fìrinn’s neck, yanking her momentarily into the air. Neil skids to a halt with a strangled shout and Cath lets go, having succeeded in halting them long enough for Kevin to catch up and throw Neil against the wall.

A crowd of unfamiliar foxes enter the hall almost immediately with Matt at their head, arriving just in time to see Caith pinning Fìrinn to the floor. Neil slumps into the wall with a startled wheeze, which is when Kevin begins clawing at Neil’s windpipe with fury-blinded fingers.

A muffled curse announces Matt’s intervention as he wrestles Kevin off Neil, his daemon jumping and snapping at Caith to drive her back. With Matt there to act as his own personal shield, Neil sucks in a lungful of air, scooping Fìrinn up to hide the shaking of his hands.

Neil stopped being squeamish when it came to fistfights long before he came to Palmetto, but the last time someone had been angry enough to put their hands around his throat they hadn’t stopped there. In the split second before Kevin had put his hands around Neil’s throat, Neil had expected him to go for the smaller, easier target at his feet.

Neil learned the hard way not to rely on the protection of the taboo that was laying hands on another person’s daemon. It’s strange that Kevin, aggravating and unpleasant as he is, is the one to remind Neil that it would never occur to most people to do the unspeakable things Neil expects of them. Fìrinn is deathly still in his arms, whether recovering from Caith’s attack or the memory of his father’s hands it’s hard to say.

Caith shakes Reynala off with a snarl and is about to pounce on her when Matt takes a swing at Kevin’s head, and human and daemon alike go sprawling. Before Matt can get another hit in, a blur of movement puts Lexia between them. Her expression is as blank as it always is but her ears are perked, alert. Andrew stands in the doorway behind them, watching the events unfold with hooded eyes and a cold smile.

Matt glances at Andrew, then at his daemon, and both he and Reynala step back, conceding.

The ensuing argument gives Neil a chance to study the newest arrivals. Renee’s gaze is gentle yet persistent, her daemon out of sight. Dan strikes a firm posture as she lectures them, her voice calm yet commanding despite the low snarl of her daemon at her feet. Neil blinks once, then twice, to make sure he’s not imagining it, but yes – the Captain’s daemon really is a fox.

The dispute is settled with no more punches thrown, and Fìrinn climbs back under Neil’s hoodie as they travel back to the court, her discomfort simmering in Neil’s gut.

Seth and Allison are the last to join the gathering, barging into the team lounge in a tangle of tension so thick Neil can taste it. Seth charges in ahead of his daemon, a glowering bulldog which scrambles around the back of his chair to sulk out of sight of the team. Allison bears her unexplained anger with far more grace, the red macaw on her shoulder turning his beak up at the scene before him before fluttering up to perch on the flat-screen at the front of the room.

Fìrinn squirms beneath Neil’s top while Wymack runs through the ins and outs of training schedules and security measures. Her discomfort passes unnoticed by all but Lexia, who still seems to find more entertainment in staring Neil down than in anything her human is doing. She’s splayed across the back of the couch, surveying the scene from behind, her only movement the occasional flick of her tail.

Then Wymack announces the district change and Andrew’s smile grows sharp with teeth. The room fills with the strident tones of daemons and humans alike, but it’s the reaction of Kevin and his daemon which draws Neil’s attention. Caith stands frozen at Kevin’s side, her head bowed as though awaiting the fall of a guillotine upon it. Kevin’s good hand grips in her fur, white-knuckled like the contact is the only thing holding Kevin together.

Andrew turns on Kevin with a smile twisting his lips. “When were you going to tell me?” he says, voice soft like a knife through the ribs.

Kevin opens his mouth to respond. Neil can recognise the lie that’s coming before it’s even told, but before Kevin gets the chance to defend himself a low whine breaks from Caith’s chest like it was punched from her. Kevin’s grip tightens as the last of their restraint unravels. Caith’s low plea, almost a whisper, is for Andrew’s ears alone. “Help me.”

“I promised, didn’t I?” Andrew replies. Slowly, Caith raises her head and meets Lexia’s steady, unblinking gaze while Kevin looks at Andrew as though he’s his life-raft. Neil can’t read the look that passes between them, but it’s enough to finally pull the tension from Kevin’s frame.

“How?” whispers Fìrinn, and Neil jumps at the sound of her voice. “How can Kevin trust him like that?”

Neil shakes his head. He has no answer to give.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heimo: Corruption of Haimo, Ancient Germanic. Meaning: Home.  
> Reynala: Mix of Reinaldo (Portuguese/Spanish) meaning counsel, power and Nala (Swahili) gift.
> 
> Guess who's starting the new decade right, and by right, I mean staying up all night editing fanfic.  
> Yep, me.   
> Happy New Year!
> 
> Next Chapter: Neil goes to Columbia and has a Real Great Time.


	4. Signs for Columbia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The monsters take Neil on a trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Typical Columbia trigger warnings apply.

The little league games Neil played under his mother’s supervision are one of the only times in Neil’s childhood that he can remember being able to simply run for the joy of running. Back before Fìrinn had taken her final form, he remembers her chasing the ball freely as she shifted from hawk to cheetah to butterfly to bat as she pleased, whatever was strongest, quickest, nimblest as the situation called for it, always with Neil hot on her heels. That was before their life on the run had forced her to retreat to the safety of Neil’s arms, which might as well have been a cage.

Returning to the court brings with it the return of that exposure as Fìrinn is forced from Neil’s arms once more. But instead of shying from the spotlight, Fìrinn charges ahead of Neil like she has nothing to lose, transformed by her very presence on the court. The beat of Neil’s pulse in time with his footsteps calls him to chase after her, and for the first time since his childhood Neil feels as though nothing in the world can catch them.

He just hopes Fìrinn feels just as liberated when they’re playing with the eyes of the world upon them.

Then again, it isn’t the world they’re afraid of; it’s the people in it.

The snap of Kevin’s Doberman daemon at his heels as they chase each other towards the goal is too close a reminder of the danger for Neil’s comfort, but if anything, it spurns him on faster. Kevin’s daemon is the picture-perfect form for a professional athlete, sleek black fur over rippling muscles, as quick as she is powerful. Caith is as ferocious towards Neil as she is to her own human, chasing them both relentlessly up and down the court while barking out instructions, accepting nothing but their best.

It’s no secret that Edgar Allan prefers players with bird-form daemons, but Neil can see why they made an exception for Caith. Sacrificing their strict dedication to aesthetic and team compatibility was not an exception the ravens made for many players, but the son of Kayleigh Day was not to be passed upon.

Unlike Coach Tetsuji, Wymack, as far as Neil can tell, makes no calculations concerning daemon forms in his hunt for fox recruits. Their daemons range from elbow-height to pocket-sized, avian, canine and everything in-between.

The first week of practice has given Neil plenty of time to study his new teammates and their daemons, the webs of animosity and amicability that spin between them on and off the court. Dan’s daemon Azu is as formidable a presence on the court as his human, snapping and tussling with other daemons as Dan tries to wrangle her team into cohesiveness. Neil wonders at first if it was the poetic justice of her fox-form daemon that had first caught Wymack’s eye, but Dan’s strength and command of the court and everyone on it far outshines any mere coincidence.

Allison’s Macaw soars over their heads in the court rafters while they play, lording on high over the chaos except to interrupt with a biting insult when provoked. Meanwhile, Kevin and Seth’s canine daemons charge across the court with matched ferocity which can be turned upon each other without warning. Caith and Seth’s bulldog Iisrar tear into each other like they’re going for the kill, only relenting when someone else’s daemon intervenes to force them apart. Matt’s daemon Reynala is no less likely to shy from a fight, and any notion Neil has of otters as soft or sweet is quickly abandoned as Matt and his daemon whip the players into line with sheer brute force whenever Dan’s words aren’t enough.

Neither Renee nor Aaron have yet seen fit to introduce their daemons to Neil, and they remain unseen throughout the week’s practice, although Neil catches sight of darting movements in Aaron’s pockets or under the line of his clothes when he charges the backliner. If Aaron or Renee have any reservations about playing rough with small daemons about their persons, they show no sign of it. Then again, they also play on the same team as Andrew, so they have to be used to a certain level of danger on the court. All the same, there’s something about Renee’s calm confidence in particular that sets Neil on edge. With no visible daemon to help him read her, he resolves instead to avoid her as much as possible. At least Aaron makes his feelings towards Neil apparent; outright antagonism is something Neil is more than equipped to deal with.

And then there’s Andrew’s daemon, Lexia. The relationship between the two only baffles Neil more the more he sees of it, and their behaviour when it comes to exy even more so.

When Andrew is playing, Lexia never steps foot on the court.

For most players, it would be impossible. Neil, who hasn’t let Fìrinn wander further than arm’s length from him in memory, grows nauseous at the mere thought. It can’t be a question of safety – Lexia doesn’t often involve herself in fights, but when she does, it’s brutal. Neil remembers all too well how Lexia pinned Nicky’s daemon to the floor with savage and unexpected strength while her human warned Nicky off Neil with knives and deadly calm whispers cut up in the grotesque stretch of his smile.

No, Lexia doesn’t stay off the court to keep out of harm’s way. Neil doubts Andrew has the self-preservation instincts to truly fear for her safety.

Luckily, as goalkeeper, Andrew spends most of the game in the end box, never far from the plexiglass wall at his back through which Lexia watches with blatant disinterest. Even so, Neil can’t understand how easily Andrew lets himself be separated by the physical barrier of the wall from so vital a part of himself. Maybe it’s the raw vulnerability of it that turns Neil’s stomach; if someone wanted to lay hands on Lexia while Andrew was on the court, he would be powerless to stop them.

The barrier between them reminds Neil of his first day in Palmetto when Andrew had so callously shut Lexia in the trunk of his car just to trick him. Like there was no connection between Andrew and his daemon at all.

If the others find their behaviour strange, they have learned not to comment on it. Neil follows their lead.

By the time Friday rolls around, Neil is more than ready for the weekend. Unfortunately, he remembers all too late that Andrew has plans for his Friday night.

Fìrinn stands on the bathroom counter while Neil changes into the new clothes the monsters have forced upon him. He smooths his hands over the unfamiliar fabric, and they look at each other in silence as they reach the same conclusion. The clothes are sleek and form-fitting, what Neil would describe as trendy if he had any real understanding of the concept to begin with. So form-fitting, in fact, that he can’t hide so much as a pack of mints beneath them, much less his daemon.

“They’re doing this on purpose,” Fìrinn snaps as Neil braces his arms against the rim of the sink.

“Of course they are. It’s a test, right? Andrew wants to break me.”

Fìrinn’s nose twitches. Her grey-white fur meshed better with Neil’s wardrobe of faded colours - she stands out too brightly beside the jet-black shirt and jeans. “We can’t let him.”

Neil nods in agreement, rubbing a quick circle into the space between her ears as he steels himself for the next step. Despite his attempts to calm himself, the moment Fìrinn catches sight of Neil’s icy blue eyes exposed without the cover of his contacts, her gaze drops away, ears pressing flat against her head.

Neil can’t blame her. He can no longer meet his own gaze in the bathroom mirror as his father’s eyes stare back at him.

The monsters are waiting for Neil when he emerges from the bathroom. Andrew’s flat expression exposes his sobriety immediately; for once, he and his daemon match. Andrew’s gaze barely flickers over Neil, but Lexia stops in his path, meeting Neil’s eyes with the closest he’s ever seen her to interest. He knows without asking that she has noticed the new eye colour.

Aaron and Andrew doze off within minutes of buckling themselves into the car. Most daemons cannot stay awake while their human is unconscious, but it’s a trick Lexia appears to have mastered; she glares at Neil from the footwell for the duration of Andrew’s nap. Neil fights back a stab of jealousy - having a guard while he slept would be invaluable for a life on the run, but despite his mother’s best attempts Neil and Fìrinn had never picked up the knack. Neil couldn’t remember having ever seen his mother’s daemon Mairidh blink, let alone sleep. He assumes the snake must have rested at some point, but whenever Neil had startled awake in the night with his mother at his back, Mairidh had always been watching them, coiled around Fìrinn like a protective vice.

“Wake Andrew up, will you?” Nicky says as they start passing signs for Columbia.

“What? Why me?” Neil casts a pointed look in Lexia’s direction. “Can’t she wake him up?”

Nicky’s chipmunk titters, spinning around on her perch on Nicky’s shoulder to watch as Nicky replies. “Haven’t you noticed? Andrew and his daemon aren’t exactly on normal terms.”

The hair on the back of Neil’s neck stands on end. Fìrinn twitches in his lap. He has noticed, of course he has, but it’s the way Nicky speaks about Andrew’s daemon like she isn’t even there.

“Even if they were,” Eleadora continues on Nicky’s behalf, “telling Lexia to do something is a waste of breath. They have that much in common.”

Nicky shushes his daemon, embarrassment written plainly in the lines around his eyes. Lexia blinks, turning her head in Eleadora’s direction without a change in expression, and Eleadora darts out of sight into the folds of Nicky’s jacket. It isn’t the first time Eleadora’s lack of filter has gotten Nicky in trouble, and it won’t be the last.

Neil is privately glad that Lexia has startled the daemon out of sight; she had spent most of the car ride teasing Fìrinn, attempting without success to draw her out of her shell and refusing to relent even when Fìrinn practically dug a hole through Neil’s chest in her attempt to escape. It’s clear she doesn’t like the way Eleadora looks at her, like Fìrinn is something to be devoured.

Aaron wakes in time to beat Neil to the task of waking Andrew; he reaches around Neil and shoves Andrew’s shoulder with little fanfare.

Luckily, Fìrinn knows from experience to be ready for Andrew’s outbursts of violence. This time, she’s quick enough to dart out of the way as Andrew’s elbow slams into Neil’s diaphragm.

“We’re going to be dead before sunrise,” Fìrinn mutters as Neil wheezes.

Neil can’t blame her for her scepticism; the night does not improve from there.

His caution is, as always, well-deserved. He knows from the moment he enters the nightclub and is hit by a wall of sound that no experience he has here will be pleasant.

He’s glad to have Fìrinn hidden safely in his arms; with the thronging crowd and the flashing rave-style lighting he doubts she would make it ten feet without being crushed underfoot.

The other daemons carry no such reservations. Caith powers through the crowd like she owns the place, opening the path for Kevin to follow. Lexia leaps onto an open table to claim it before anyone else can, sending a glass over the edge so it smashes on the floor. She stays standing guard over the table while Andrew drags Neil to the bar. Neil glances back, thinks of Andrew’s promise to Kevin. Maybe it isn’t just the table she’s guarding.

They are served by a bartender with a small blue frog which sits between glasses on the ring-stained bar while her human pours drinks. The black speckles across her back look like flecks of paint in the lighting, and her human smirks at Neil when he catches him staring. It’s not for the reason the bartender thinks it is; the colours remind Neil of a glossy children’s book on the rainforest that sat at the bottom of his wardrobe along with a few other scraps of entertainment for the long nights he spent hiding in it. There had been a picture of a similar frog on one of the pages, along with a note that bright colours in certain animals were supposed to be a warning.

The page flashes before Neil’s eyes again when he throws back his shot of soda with the rest of them and tastes the unbearably sweet tang of cracker dust. Poison. Bright colours were supposed to be a warning for poison.

Fìrinn slips from Neil’s lap as he lurches clumsily to his feet. They’re half-way out of the booth when Lexia and Andrew pounce as one; Lexia has Fìrinn pinned with a press of claws to the vulnerable arteries of her neck, and if that isn’t enough to still them then the yank of Andrew’s hand in his hair is. He uses it to slam Neil back into his seat.

None of them seem affected by Neil’s death threats. Fìrinn stumbles to the floor with a thump and tangles in Neil’s feet as Aaron and Nicky drag Neil to the dancefloor. He loses sight of Aaron almost immediately. He wishes he could say the same for Nicky.

Shadows and figures and music blur around him. Fìrinn’s pupils are blown wide and Neil can see his reflection in them. He looks insane.

Nicky’s hands on him aren’t as much of a surprise as they should be. At the same time, Eleadora catches Fìrinn and nuzzles into her, tight and warm and _wrong, wrong, wrong_. The unwanted touch shocks Neil to a standstill in time for Nicky to jam his lips against Neil’s.

Both Neil and Fìrinn are too far out of it to put up a fight. Neil has learned under his mother’s obsessive tutelage to protect himself, to guard Fìrinn from violent hands and dangerous eyes. His daemon is more than used to the world’s brutalities, but this isn’t the kind of attack, the kind of _touch_ , either of them were prepared for.

He isn’t sure if the bile in his mouth is from the drugs or the kiss.

Eventually he’s released from the chaos of the dancefloor, but only so that Andrew can throw him up against the wall. It’s the interrogation Neil knew was coming from the moment the cracker dust hit the back of his throat.

Andrew’s words are hard to follow over the thump of EDM blaring over the speakers and the haze of Neil’s high, but neither he nor Fìrinn can hide a flinch when Andrew tosses the word _Runaway_ at him. The word is a grenade ready to blow Neil’s fleeting existence to shreds, and they all know it.

Andrew leaves him to think over his response. Or perhaps it’s to let the high _really_ kick in. To let Neil stew in his panic. To let him bend himself under the pressure until he breaks. Neil collapses against the wall, searching the fuzzy periphery of his vision for an exit. The cheap black paint chips under his fingernails as he scrabbles to hold himself upright.

He finds Lexia at the first set of stairs. Her blank golden eyes are almost a taunt, daring Neil to try passing her. He’s almost willing to take his chances, but Fìrinn cowers behind him, and Neil can’t make himself take another step without her. He would pick her up if he were at all convinced he could walk without dropping her, or even stay upright without the wall under his hands.

Nicky and Eleadora are waiting at the next staircase. They push Neil and Fìrinn back into the crowd, ignoring their flailing attempts to shove and strike and snap, and the last thing Neil remembers is Nicky’s cracker-laced kiss and Eleadora’s too-hot touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dan's fox: Azu (short for Azubuike). Nigerian. Meaning "the past is your strength".  
> Seth's bulldog: Iisrar. Arabic. Meaning persistence, stubbornness.  
> Mary's viper: Mairidh. Scottish Gaelic. Meaning endurance. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! God, this chapter was a monster to edit. Hence my posting at two in the freakin' morning.
> 
> Up next: The morning after and a heart-to-heart.


	5. A Dangerous, Disquieting Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil returns from Columbia and truths are told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, university is kicking my entire ass. How do Kevin and Aaron find the time for athletic stardom AND baller grades? Share your secrets, foxes.

Fìrinn spends her first waking moments the following morning hissing and snapping at anyone stupid enough to come within reach of Neil. He’s thankful for the distraction as he tries not to bring up any more of the lining of his stomach than can be avoided. A haze of memories dance behind his eyelids from the night before, Columbia, Eden’s, Andrew, Nicky-

He retches.

Locked in the privacy of the bathroom, he allows Fìrinn exactly thirty seconds to curse out Andrew, Nicky, Neil, herself, Palmetto and just about everyone else they had ever met in a variety of creative terms Neil had forgotten he knew. Once it’s out of their system she coaches Neil as he scrambles through the narrow bathroom window before she follows him through it.

They had left him jeans and a t-shirt in the bathroom, a mercifully clean change of clothes but still nothing baggy enough to carry Fìrinn under. In some ways it’s a blessing; the day is blisteringly hot and holding Fìrinn against his chest would be unbearably warm for both of them.

He hitches one lift and then another, running through a list of imaginary interview questions. He finds the energy to paste a polite smile on his face when a friendly female trucker compliments his “adorable bunny daemon,” gripping Fìrinn’s fur before she can snap back a retort.

His arms are completely numb from carrying Fìrinn by the time he’s walked the remaining eleven miles to campus. Between that, his aching legs, oncoming heatstroke and the lingering nausea, he couldn’t survive a physical confrontation with a light breeze, let alone Andrew.

Neil can hear Wymack’s daemon Atsila barking from outside the apartment. He pauses with his fist hovering over the door as he forces back the memories of his father’s canine daemon before knocking. The door swings open within seconds.

Atsila circles Neil, tense with quiet worry, while Wymack berates him. Eventually Atsila takes pity on Neil and suggests a shower. Neil leaves Wymack pacing holes into the floorboards to take her suggestion. The clothes Wymack lends him are baggy enough to hide Fìrinn, but Neil’s arms feel like jelly even after a hot shower. He couldn’t carry her a step further no matter how much he wants to; a fact Neil is brutally aware of when he returns to the living room to find Andrew waiting for him.

“Have a nice stroll?” Andrew asks, voice is terrifyingly even.

Lexia is perched on the windowsill behind him, apparently finding the movement of traffic on the street below more interesting than the events unfolding around her.

“Fuck you,” snaps Fìrinn, just beating Neil to the chase.

Atsila calmly moves to place herself between Neil and Andrew. Her eyes are on Andrew, body tense like a coiled spring, while Wymack snaps his fingers in front of Andrew’s face. “I don't know what the beef is between you two, but it ends here and now.”

Neil can tell by the way Fìrinn rears up onto her hind legs that she’s ready for a fight that Neil’s body can’t survive. He cuts in before she can say something they’ll both regret. “Coach, I need to talk to Andrew for a minute. Can we use your office?”

“No,” say Wymack and Atsila as one.

“We don't trust you two not to kill each other,” the pitbull explains on Wymack’s behalf.

With a huff of defeat, Neil surrenders to German. “What the hell is your problem?”

Fìrinn curses quietly at his side as surprise wipes the irritation from Andrew’s expression. Slowly, like lava spilling from a volcano, Lexia turns towards them. Neil decided weeks ago that he prefers her indifference to her interest – the former is far less dangerous. The force of her gaze feels like it could melt right through him, burning “Neil” to the ground like a waxwork dummy.

It feels like forever before Andrew answers. “If I can’t get an answer from you, I’ll get it wherever I can.” He turns his gaze to Fìrinn. Her ears flatten back against her head, and Neil swears his heartbeat must be hammering as fast as hers. Andrew continues to speak, but it’s no longer directed at Neil. “It’s easy to hide behind colour contacts and fake passports and bad die-jobs. Not so easy to hide your soul, is it? Not in forms like ours.” He gestures to Fìrinn like he’s pointing a knife instead of a finger. “Tell me, little rabbit. What are you running from?”

Neil had spent the three-hour walk back to campus going over his story, ironing out detail after detail until he found the perfect fabrication to get Andrew off his back. He opens his mouth with a lie ready on his lips, but Andrew holds up a hand to silence him. “No.”

“What?”

“You can lie. She can’t.” Andrew says casually, as though he’s ripping apart a paper towel and not Neil’s entire life. “I want to hear it from her.”

Fear grips Neil’s chest in an iron fist. He expects Fìrinn to wilt under Andrew’s calculating gaze. She does not.

It’s not the first time Fìrinn has surprised Neil in this way. Daemons aren’t _meant_ to be surprising, at least, not to their humans; they represent a part of one’s soul, so how can a person be surprised by their own nature?

Maybe Neil is more of a fighter than he thought he was. Or maybe he’s just stupid.

“Neil is not a mole for Riko,” Fìrinn says in halting German. “We’re just here to play Exy. That’s all we want.”

Andrew shakes his head. “Not good enough.”

“You said yourself she can’t lie,” Neil snaps. “Don’t ask for the truth if you’re just going to dismiss it.”

“Did I say I didn’t believe her?” Andrew throws back. Eventually he waves his fingers in a pompous _go on_ gesture.

Neil and Fìrinn pass the story back and forth between them. Fìrinn feeds Andrew just enough fragments of truth to keep him convinced, while Neil works in amendments and adjustments enough to keep Andrew from the heart of the matter. His parent’s involvement in the mafia is enough to make Lexia’s ears twitch in their direction. There’s a traitorous thrill of excitement in Neil’s gut at the reaction, a thrill he’s too scared to analyse. Attention is danger, interest is death. He can’t understand why receiving either from Andrew’s daemon excites him, and isn’t sure he wants to. The sensation is almost enough to melt the icy grip of fear as he exposes more of himself to Andrew than he has to anyone. Neil digs his fingernails into his mouth, trying to claw away the sickening smile the mixture of panic and terror and triumph has pasted across his face.

Andrew falls silent once Neil has told his story. It stretches and stretches, casting a heavy shadow across the room and its occupants. Wymack shifts his weight while Atsila firms up her stance as though preparing to intercept an attack. Fìrinn sinks back onto all fours as though all her strength left her in the snippets of truth she let free.

But Andrew is not yet finished with Fìrinn. “Then why did you come here?”

Neil prepares an easy lie, but once again Fìrinn surprises him. “We’re tired.”

It’s not just the answer that surprises him; it’s the exhaustion weighing down her words. Neil spends most of his life pushing down the damage life handed him, but the wretchedness of Fìrinn’s voice is a brutal reminder of all he’s put them through. He blinks away the flickering image of a burning car in his mind but knows when Fìrinn speaks next that it’s all she can think of, is possibly all she’s thought of for a long time. “We’re tired of being nothing.”

Andrew stares Fìrinn down for an eternity with an expression which is dark and heavy and impossible.

It’s as Andrew reaches to pull Neil’s hands away from his mouth, exposing his ghastly expression to the scrutiny of his intense gaze, that Lexia moves.

She drops down from the windowsill to the coffee table, moving slowly towards Fìrinn in a movement Neil might describe as predatory. Andrew’s head snaps around as he turns a black glare in her direction. It’s hard to tell if Lexia notices it; she stops in front of Fìrinn, statue-still. Fìrinn meets her gaze, unflinching.

It’s no secret that Andrew’s relationship with his daemon isn’t normal. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact amongst all the other violent quirks of Andrew’s existence, but the truth is that Andrew behaves as though he has no daemon at all. In the same way that the Minyard brothers orbit each other with no acknowledgement of the others’ presence, Andrew and his daemon do no more than share space. Neil has heard more than one member of their team describe Andrew as soulless, and it’s hard to argue otherwise when the man appears to all intents and purposes to have no connection to his soul.

This moment is the first that Neil can remember Andrew acknowledging Lexia’s existence at all. The burning, bottomless hatred Andrew turns in the direction of his daemon is strange and horrifying, but the proof that he feels anything for her at all is monumental.

Neil wonders, not for the first time, what else is hiding beneath Andrew’s layers of drug-induced mania and apparent indifference.

“Let me stay,” Neil says, drawing Andrew’s attention back from his daemon. “I’m not ready to give this up yet.”

Fìrinn moves forwards, closing the distance between her and Lexia. It’s the closest they’ve ever been without violent intent. Human stands before human and daemon stands before daemon.

“I don’t know if we can.” Fìrinn adds quietly. Neil wishes he could say otherwise, but there’s nothing else he can think to say. Fìrinn, as Andrew pointed out, doesn’t lie. “I don’t think we’ll survive going back to what we were. But staying here will kill us too.”

Stony indifference sweeps back across Andrew’s face. “Such self-destructive tendencies from someone with such a will to survive. Next time I may ask you to justify that.”

“Let’s not have a next time.” Their moment – for want of a better word – ends. Neil watches as Lexia retreats beneath the coffee table and out of sight.

Andrew slides a look after her. “Let’s not,” he agrees.

And with that, the Foxhole Court is Neil’s. For as long as he can keep it.

Hope is a dangerous, disquieting thing, but Neil thinks perhaps he likes it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wymack's pitbull terrier: Atsila. Cherokee. Meaning "Fire".
> 
> hggggggh I really wish I had more time to edit this chapter but if I don't get this out now it's not gonna happen. 
> 
> Next chapter: Neil is blackmailed into stardom.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	6. A Mystery Addition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Kathy Ferdinand Show

On the morning of the Kathy Ferdinand interview, the team stumbles towards the bus in varying states of consciousness under a dark sky. Neil knows already that Kevin is not a morning person but watching Caith walk into a glass door three seconds after Kevin made the same error is entertaining if not enlightening.

He lets his mind settle into a heavy fog for most of the journey, only roused as they draw closer to the studio by Wymack’s cursing as he finds Kevin and Andrew still fast asleep at the back of the bus.

Neil half-turns to watch the spectacle he has come to expect from waking Andrew. It’s then that he notices Lexia is curled up on the seat behind his. As always, she is unaffected by Andrew’s comatose state, blinking at Neil as though his existence offends her.

She doesn’t flinch when Wymack’s wallet bounces off Andrew’s head and he startles awake in his usual burst of violence.

While Andrew shakes himself awake, Atsila squeezes herself through Wymack’s legs so she can nudge Caith awake. Neil is always surprised by how gentle Wymack’s daemon is in comparison with the man himself, and it’s a difference made all the more evident when Wymack plants his boot on whatever part of Kevin he can reach to shove him awake. While he’s getting better at avoiding comparisons between Wymack and Nathan, Neil can’t help but think of his father’s greyhound daemon, slim and swift and brutal. Atsila is slow and gruff in comparison, but the low growl she lets out when Wymack is particularly frustrated is still too familiar. Neil trusts kind daemons even less than he trusts kind humans. Maybe it’s the possibility that their kindness is genuine.

Caith stirs quicker than Kevin, the adrenaline of nerves coursing through her before they reach her still-sluggish human. She begins to pace laps up and down the aisle, forcing Kevin out of his seat and shuffling after her.

Movement draws Neil’s attention to Dan and Matt, who are stirring in the row in front of him. Their daemons are curled around each other, the fox and otter spilling over their laps, and Neil feels the need to avert his eyes from the display of intimacy.

Kathy Ferdinand greets them in the dingy, streetlight-amber carpark, her fluffy Persian daemon trailing behind her like they’re part of a royal procession. The only other person Neil knows with a feline daemon is Andrew – although _knows_ is a stretch – but the two are nothing alike. Lexia’s absence of fur makes her painfully small, what Neil would describe as vulnerable if such a word could ever be applied to Andrew. Her strangely wrinkled, patchy skin and wide, piercing eyes caused Seth to call her “Andrew’s fuck-ugly rat.” Neil, having never wasted much time on judging the aesthetics of humans nor their daemons, finds the insult meaningless. She’s subtly shivering in the morning air, unable to crush the reaction to the cold like she does every other. Andrew, unsurprisingly, doesn’t acknowledge the chill, although he must feel it as keenly as his daemon.

Kathy’s Persian is her polar opposite, smothered in cream-coloured fur that puffs out around his neck like an expensive coat. He looks far too pleased with himself as he circles Kevin’s ankles and then Neil’s, close enough to make him twitch. Kathy’s eyes are similarly lit with self-satisfied joy as she introduces herself to them.

Caith stands stoic and tense as always while Kevin’s public personality slides into place, keeping her distance despite the outward warmth of Kevin’s greeting as he shakes Kathy’s hand. Neil enjoys a stab of triumph in the knowledge that his isn’t the only daemon that struggles to play a part.

“Neil Josten,” Kathy says by way of greeting as she turns to him. Fìrinn twitches unhappily at the thought that he was so easily recognised. Kathy’s eyes fix on the movement of Neil’s rucksack as Fìrinn peeks through the zipper. “And who is _this_?”

Neil answers her question with a stony look. Fìrinn is in Neil’s file under a fake name which he never bothered giving the Foxes. His teammates know instinctively not to bother Fìrinn; they haven’t questioned Neil’s overprotective behaviour nor the absence of an introduction, just as Neil doesn’t ask after Aaron or Renee’s hidden daemons.

She takes his non-reply with the practiced grace of a TV personality, betrayed only by the frustrated swish of her daemon’s tail. He’s still circling Neil, the loop drawing closer and closer like the tightening of a noose.

“I want you on my show this morning,” Kathy says, behaving to all intents and purposes as though this is a perfectly rational thing to suggest. “You’re a mystery addition to the Fox line, a rookie out of a tiny town in Arizona. Everyone wants to know who you are.”

“No,” Neil says. Kathy’s daemon stops abruptly, tail swishing inches from Neil’s ankle. Neil tampers down on the impulse to boot him away. Nausea rolls over him when he realises where instinct is leading him; he refuses to sink to his father’s violent tendencies.

“Be smart, Neil,” Kathy says, her smile twitching. It reminds Neil of the way Lexia’s claws unsheathe when the conversation is building up to a fight. Maybe he can see the common thread between their personalities after all.

“I said no.”

Kathy’s expression doesn’t change, but her daemon twitches angrily. She tries again, “you’re not looking at the big picture.” She turns to Kevin. “Kevin, you understand, don’t you?”

“He’ll do it,” Kevin says.

“ _C’est pas ta décision_ _!”_ Neil spits, outraged, as Fìrinn starts to wriggle furiously in his backpack. He suddenly feels the crushing canvas walls choking him as though he were the one zipped inside. He swings his bag to the floor and yanks the zip down, hoping it will relieve Fìrinn’s claustrophobia. In his distraction he almost misses Wymack’s piercing stare. Atsila is standing to attention, and Neil remembers too late that they have now seen him speaking both French and German with relative fluency.

Kevin’s picture-perfect smile doesn’t flicker, but Caith moves towards Neil, muscles tensing under her black fur like she’s steeling herself for a fight. “Don’t be an idiot,” Kevin replies in cold French.

Caith lowers her head to Neil’s rucksack, looming over Fìrinn like she’s her next meal. “What can you be so afraid of, rabbit?” she says, her voice low and eerily level. “Too afraid to play alongside a champion, too cowardly to walk around on your own two feet. Stand in the spotlight for once in your life or spend the rest of it wallowing in mediocrity.”

Neil sucks in a breath. Kevin is a bastard, but at least he has some understanding of restraint. His daemon, however, doesn’t pull her punches. Unfortunately, Neil’s doesn’t either.

“You’re one to talk,” Fìrinn says with venom. “You can’t walk two steps without that psycho at your back.”

Caith snaps, Fìrinn ducks. Kevin and Neil reach for their daemons to pull them back before any of their audience can interfere. Kevin shoots a reassuring smile to Kathy, and they both pretend she’s convinced by it. He turns back to Neil. “Do this, or you and I are finished.”

Fìrinn swears viciously. Neil isn’t even sure what language it’s in as blood roars in his ears. He knows he can’t bring himself to let go, and so does Kevin.

Kevin nods to Kathy and switches back to English. “He’ll do it.”

Kathy motions for them to follow her back to the building. Neil stoops to scoop his rucksack back up, but with a harsh nudge of her muzzle Caith turfs Fìrinn out onto the concrete and fixes Neil with a glare. Neil swallows back the prickle of discomfort as Fìrinn staggers across the cold concrete and snatches up the empty bag, following Kevin’s lead into the studio. Reynala scampers ahead of Matt to wriggle between Neil and Kevin’s daemons while Matt shoots Kevin a glare.

Since their arrival, Matt’s daemon seems to have taken it upon herself to act as Fìrinn’s bodyguard, a decision neither Neil nor his daemon know how to respond to. Fìrinn shies back from the attention as usual, distrustful of Matt’s daemon, who’s constant agitation is at odds with her human’s laid-back demeanour.

Neil’s so busy watching their daemons bickering he’s nearly tripped by Andrew as he appears at Neil’s side. Lexia is impossibly out of sight despite the lack of hiding spaces in the empty lot. It’s as though Andrew gets a kick out of flaunting his independence from her, or vice-versa.

Andrew shoves Neil away, movements sloppy as his morning dosage worms through his system. “You’re so stupid,” he says brightly.

“Left your daemon on the bus, did you?” Neil replies mockingly.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Andrew says, matching Neil’s tone in a way that sounds like he’s only half-kidding.

Neil watches Kevin’s solo part of the interview from the wings of the stage with detached panic. Caith manages at least a stoic stillness while Kevin laughs along with Kathy and the crowd, letting no more than a twitch of her ears betray Kevin when the skiing accident is mentioned. When Kathy announces Neil at last, Neil clenches his teeth and all but drags himself onto the stage, nearly tripping over Fìrinn as she does her best to hide herself behind Neil’s legs. He’s doing his best to present a calm and confident exterior, but his control is nowhere near Kevin’s, and Fìrinn can’t maintain his façade. He takes his seat, wishing that she could climb onto his lap and provide a comforting presence, but staying on the floor will at least keep her out of the cameras’ sights.

Neil answers Kathy’s string of mundane questions about Arizona and the Foxes with minimal decorum. Thankfully, Kevin is the real star of the show, and soon Kathy’s attention passes back to him as she probes him about the Ravens. Riko’s name prompts another twitch from Caith, and Neil has to admit that Kevin isn’t as cowardly as he had believed; he had to have known he would have his trauma paraded on stage from the moment he took Kathy’s invitation, but he forced himself up there anyway and sidestepped the worst of it with careful grace.

“It’s difficult to keep in touch,” Kevin says levelly, and Neil dares to hope for a moment that that’s the matter dealt with.

His mother taught him long ago that hope is for fools, and once again she’s proven right as Edgar Allan’s anthem begins to drum over the studio speakers.

“Well,” says Kathy. Her daemon hops onto her desk in front of her with his chest fluffed up proudly, and Neil realises too late the self-satisfied expression is the delight of a secret well-kept. “Have we got a treat for you!”

Movement in Neil’s peripheral vision draws his gaze to the darkened wings of the stage. From the shadows comes a flutter of wings as the dark gives birth to a dark, feathered shape.

The daemon soars across the stage in one sleek movement and lands on the back of the sofa inches from Kevin’s shoulder. Neil studies her with a familiar kind of horror, recognising the glossy sheen to her feathers, the sneering curl of her beak, the razor-sharp claws.

“Rikka,” Neil whispers.

The raven’s head twitches in his direction, her beady black eyes fixing upon him.

If there had been any doubt as to who was about to step onto the stage, it evaporates like rain on molten lava.

Riko follows his daemon onto the stage to thunderous applause.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Riko's raven: Rikka. Japanese. Meaning rich, powerful ruler.
> 
> Next time: Interview part two, electric boogaloo
> 
> Thanks for reading, please drop a comment <3


	7. We Keep Running

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil hadn’t spent much time considering what form Fìrinn would settle in until it happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a bit of a diversion in this one, lads. Hopefully in a good way.

There’s a lot Neil doesn’t remember about his childhood, memories growing heavy with the merciful fog of time and trauma. It’s probably for the best; the memories he does have are unpleasant enough that he doesn’t mourn for those he lost.

The day he met Kevin and Riko in the nest is, unfortunately, one of the clearest. Riko’s daemon had settled already, a proud rush of black swooping and diving over their heads while they played. Rikka had taken her final form several years prior, absurdly early by anyone’s standards.

Even at such a young age, Kevin and Riko were already the prodigal sons of the Exy world. News sites seized on news of Rikka’s settlement with fanatic adoration. Words like “fate” and “destiny” followed Riko through the headlines as the Exy world basked in the perfect synchronicity of the raven daemon and the raven team. It was treated as a confirmation of what the trashier networks had been touting since Riko had been old enough to hold his first stick; that Riko was born to lead the ravens. His daemon settling in raven form was as good as placing the crown on his head.

Rikka’s perfect form was another burning point of jealousy that had led Neil to follow Riko and Kevin’s progress so religiously in the years which followed. Through dumb luck or a force beyond understanding, Riko’s daemon had taken the perfect form for him, or at the very least a form that appeared as such to the outside world.

Neil hadn’t spent much time considering what form Fìrinn would settle in until it happened. He had known on an academic level that it was coming – his mother had explained in loose and discouraging terms that it was part of growing up, an indicator of the type of person you were growing into. She had also told him in no uncertain terms how much more difficult it would be to be on the run once Fìrinn settled. It was easier when Fìrinn could flit and shift between forms at a moment’s notice to blend in or hide as the situation called for it. In public she could be anything from a mouse to a moth to a chameleon, zipping over their heads as a bird or insect to scout for danger or avoid a fight. Most importantly of all, it was harder for his father’s men to hunt them without a consistent description of Neil’s daemon to follow.

Despite his best and wasted efforts, Neil’s daemon had settled a matter of months after their departure from Baltimore.

Neil had expected something small and slippery; a ferret, a mouse, a beetle. The kind of animal Fìrinn shifted into reflexively whenever the slam of the front door announced his father’s return home. When his father’s greyhound lunged for her, she usually changed into something a bit more durable or prickly, anything from a turtle to a hedgehog. Like it ever made a difference. Neil was always better at running than he was at fighting.

A hare shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He swallowed his disappointment while his mother did her best to hide her frustration and fear, knowing that he was the cause of it but just as incapable of controlling it. Just the same as every other problem in Mary Hatford’s life, Neil’s existence was at the heart of it. 

He remembers the moment of Fìrinn’s settling as clearly as he remembers the events which preceded it. A close call with one of his father’s men – too close – had left them driving through the early hours of the morning in a stolen convertible with the roof blown off (beggars couldn’t be choosers) with the scent of drying blood burning Neil’s nose off in the backseat.

He wasn’t sure how many state lines they had crossed, what day it was, or even who’s blood was staining his torso black.

He had been sleeping, or drifting, somewhere half a pint of blood shy of comatose for… hours, or days, or something. The last thing he remembered was two black cars pulling up to the gas station, his mother pulling him from the store with nails cutting into his forearm. No, the last thing he remembered was the sleek, silent movement as the man and the woman pulled guns from their holsters, and the explosion of pain just below his collarbone as a bullet tore through an inch shy of his Kevlar vest. No, the last thing he remembered, as his mother dragged them to the car, Fìrinn a hummingbird flailing in his hand, her wings fluttering to the pace of his heart, was how she turned, gun raised, and shot Neil’s assailant right between the eyes.

The gunshot screeched in Neil’s ears, his hearing knocked to pieces by the proximity.

The trickle of blood reached as far as the tip of the woman’s nose before she fell to her knees. The woman’s daemon, a hawk diving for Neil with yellow claws glinting inches from his head, burst into a shower of glimmering dust which rained down upon him.

The trickle of blood drawing a perfectly straight line down the woman’s nose is the last thing he remembered with clarity. It was followed by a dark jumble of shouting, tyres screeching, a distant clap of more gunfire.

Then he was coming to in the backseat of an unfamiliar car, new clothes already stained where the blood had soaked through his bandages. Legs twitching with the memory of his mother’s scream, _run, Chris, run_.

Fìrinn came too at the same moment, a dormouse quivering in the palm of his hands.

“Mum,” Neil had grunted.

Her mother didn’t take her eyes off the road but reached behind her, grabbing Neil’s outstretched hand and squeezing it. Probably to reassure herself more than him. Her viper daemon poked his head out of the hem of her sleeve, casting an evaluating eye over Neil’s injuries before sliding out of sight once more.

“Did you…” Neil stuttered, coughed. He could taste blood on his tongue, his lips, down his throat. It felt like he was full of it, choking his lungs. He remembered the woman’s daemon bursting into nothing above him and shivered. His clothes were different, but he imagined he could feel the dust still clinging to him. “You killed them.”

“They were going to kill us,” his mother replied sharply. She withdrew her hand. “You have to get used to it, Neil.”

Her viper appeared again a few minutes later, slipping over the edge of his mother’s collar to fix him with a piercing gaze. His eyes were dark green, same as his mother’s, his pupils thin slits.

“This isn’t a game,” Mairidh hissed with startling ferocity. “This is our lives, and we have to do what it takes to survive. This doesn’t end, because the moment it does, we’re dead. Understand? We keep moving, we keep running, we live.”

“I understand,” Neil said. He took a deep breath and forced the shaking from his hands. “We keep running.”

When he next awoke from a nightmare plagued with blood and bodies and daemons turning to dust, Fìrinn was a hare. Mousy brown hair – the same colour he had dyed his own three weeks prior – darker brown eyes constantly blinking, scanning for predators from every direction. Strong, quick legs. Born from fear and perfect for running.

Neil had known from the moment he saw her that she would not change again. The knowledge was like a weight encasing his chest. He looked into Fìrinn’s eyes and saw his entire future mapped out for him. Everything he was and everything he would be.

Kevin’s daemon had been settled too, when they first met back in Evermore, had been settled since Kayleigh Day’s death. Neil thinks of the similarities between Caith and Fìrinn in an idle moment as he’s adding another secreted clipping to his binder. Settling in the aftermath of death. It made sense, in some ways; the confrontation with the violent and unpredictable nature of mortality had been for them the final push from childhood to adolescence.

Fìrinn’s final form bears witness to that. She’s built to run, because running is survival. Kevin’s Doberman is the opposite; built for loyalty and persistence. Loyalty to his mother, the people who took him in after her death. Loyal to her dream for him. Ready to labour day after day to achieve it. Neil’s sure from everything he’s learned about the Moriyamas that they would have preferred Kevin’s daemon to be a raven too, or a bird at the very least, in line with the motif Riko and Edgar Allan present to the world. A Doberman would have been the next best thing – loyalty easily twisted in their favour, hardworking to the point of self-destruction, a speedy yet forceful presence on court. The second-best form for the second-best player.

Then there’s Riko’s perfect raven. Neil is living proof that one cannot choose their daemon’s form, but he wonders if the expectations placed on Riko’s head from such a young age did the trick for him, warped his soul into the shape everyone expected of him. Trapped him forever under the heavy expectations that crushed his childhood before it had time to begin.

Neil might have been sympathetic if he didn’t know what he does now.

On the court, Caith runs with her weight shifted to her right, her front left paw noticeably weaker than the rest. Neil had assumed it was psychosomatic, a sympathy pain echoing the injury of her human’s hand. Now Neil wonders if Riko hadn’t stopped at Kevin’s hand.

Riko’s daemon hasn’t changed since the day of their fateful game. She perches on the back of Kathy’s sofa, claws digging into the expensive creamy leather in excitement as her human follows her onto the stage.

Riko Moriyama takes his place at his daemon’s side, and the crowd erupts. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> look who decided to sideline actual plot for a whole chapter for worldbuilding *jazz hands*  
>  ngl it was hella fun to write tho
> 
> lemme know what you thought <3


	8. A Bit of an Attitude Problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A long-awaited reunion, some hostile exchanges and a strange, quiet connection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for violence and mentions of abuse

“Kevin. It’s been so long.”

There’s a scuffle and a crash in the audience which rips Neil’s eyes from Riko. Renee, Matt and Wymack have Andrew pinned between them, but just when it looks like he’s truly stuck, Lexia shoots out from beneath his seat, claws scrabbling against the studio’s linoleum floor as she sprints towards the stage.

She reaches the edge of the spotlights just as Wymack’s Pitbull catches her in her jaw, dragging her back by the scuff of her neck. Her indignant yowl reaches Neil across the stage, but luckily – or not – everyone else’s attention is on the reunion unfolding before them.

Riko stands over Kevin while his daemon keeps vigil at Kevin’s shoulder, trapping him between them. Caith is still in her place at Kevin’s feet, pressed back into Kevin’s legs like she wants to melt into them. Kevin’s Doberman is one of the largest daemons Neil knows, but the moment Riko stepped on stage she seemed to shrink three sizes.

Neil recognises the body language all too well. Any animosity Neil feels toward Kevin for forcing him onto the show evaporates. He can't be angry when Riko is here, not when Kevin’s daemon reacts to him the same way Fìrinn did to Neil’s father.

Riko steps forward, and Caith is forced to move from his path or be trodden underfoot. She slides from between them like melting snow, backing towards Neil and Fìrinn as she does so. Fìrinn scrabbles into Neil’s lap to avoid her trajectory. Neil winces as she wriggles into the camera’s field of vision, but the microphone clipped to his lapel prevents him from warning her off.

Riko pulls Kevin into a hug. Neil is the only person close enough to Caith to hear her strangled whine.

When they sit, Kevin ends up pressed against Neil in his effort to distance himself from Riko. While they exchange stilted words that the audience seems to mistake for friendly barbing, Rikka hops along the back of the couch, following Kevin’s movement. Neil fixes the corvid with a glare which is ignored. Her feathers are fluffed up, making her look bigger than she is, and her eyes are fixed on Kevin with vicious satisfaction while Riko needles Kevin’s insecurities for all to see with devastating precision. 

Kevin is still frozen in his seat, his eyes empty with horror, but with each jibe Caith sinks a little further until she’s pressed to the floor, tail literally between her legs.

“I'm worried Kevin’s wishful thinking and obsession will lead him to injure himself again. Can he recover a second time, emotionally or mentally?” Riko says smoothly. Rikka caws quietly, close enough to Kevin’s ear that he flinches back from it. To Neil, it sounds like laughter.

Fìrinn jerks in Neil’s lap, unable to stomach anymore of Riko’s cruelty.

“I thought friends were supposed to cheer each other on,” she snaps. Three heads turn towards her, but there’s some confused muffling from the crowd. Fìrinn isn’t within range of Neil’s mic; he takes a moment to thank a god he doesn’t believe in.

“Sorry,” says Kathy. “What was that? Oh, of course, forgive my bad manners. You all deserve an introduction! Riko, Neil. Neil, Riko. Kevin’s past and present, or should I say, past and future?”

Fìrinn’s words are what finally draws the attention of Riko and his daemon. Rikka flaps past the back of Kevin’s head until she’s perched between them like a gargoyle hanging over their shoulders. Neil can tell by the way Kevin’s hand flies to the back of his neck that the tip of her wing had skimmed his nape. Neil falls momentarily silent as he swallows back a thick wave of nausea.

It seems to confirm the worst Neil’s imagination had come up with. Riko’s daemon touched Kevin, glancing enough to be played off as an accident if anyone noticed, but Neil knows what it means when the words “Riko” and “accident” come together, has seen the evidence carved into Kevin’s left hand. Riko’s daemon broke the taboo less than a foot from Neil’s face, and he’s nearly sick from the horror, the memories surging through him, but it’s washed away in an instant by the outrage he feels on Kevin’s behalf. Kevin, who’s trembling so badly Neil can feel it, who clamps down on his reaction far too effectively for the violation to be new to him.

Neil meets Fìrinn’s gaze, and a look of understanding passes between them. They turn as one towards Riko.

“It’s not Kathy that has bad manners here,” says Fìrinn, audibly. There’s a whoop of laughter from the audience which tells Neil his mike picked it up. Good.

Rikka’s beak clicks furiously what feels like right next to his ear, and Neil holds back a flinch.

“Bold words from someone who has yet to earn their place on the court, let alone this stage,” Riko says, his words sharper than steel. “I cannot expect you to understand the relationship between Kevin and myself.”

“What relationship?” says Neil. Fìrinn laughs – _laughs_ , Neil can’t remember the last time he heard her laugh – and the sound covers the panicked hiss of air passing through Caith’s bared teeth.

“I will ask you to tone down that animosity,” Riko snarls. In a sudden, sharp movement, Rikka takes flight, darting between Kevin and Neil’s shoulders to land on her human’s shoulder. While Riko’s voice remains level and haughty, it’s clear from Rikka’s bristling feathers that Neil has succeeded in riling him. Judging by the downward twitch of Riko’s lips, he’s aware of exactly how much his daemon is giving away. No, more than aware, _furious_.

“Not possible, I’m afraid,” Neil smirks.

“We have a bit of an attitude problem,” Fìrinn adds.

Cain drops to her haunches with another low whine. The movement is enough to attract the attention of Kathy’s daemon, who drops down from the desk to study Caith while her human’s focus remains on Riko and Neil.

“Let’s backtrack for a moment,” Kathy says smoothly before Neil and Fìrinn can do any further damage. “Kevin, it is undeniable that you and Riko have a relationship like no other. Now that Kevin is back on court, is there no possibility of seeing you playing together again?”

Rikka lets another laughter-like squawk loose. “His new inadequacies are unforgivable to Edgar Allan.”

“Yet,” says Riko, shooting her a quelling look. “His place has always been and always will be with the ravens. We’d like him to return to his proper place in a coaching capacity.”

It’s Fìrinn’s turn to laugh. “Unbelievable.”

Neil really should tell her to shut up, but the look Riko sends her is as priceless as it is terrifying.

“She wasn’t asking you, though, was she, Riko?” Neil says, imitating Riko’s smooth tone. “She asked Kevin.”

Riko leans forward, his fury barely masked by the smile cutting across his face. Rikka hops down from his shoulder, startled by the movement.

Kevin presses even further into Neil, the hand that’s out of sight of the cameras gripping at the back of Neil’s jacket. Neil isn’t sure if it’s for Kevin to reassure himself or hold Neil back from a fight.

“Well, Kevin?” Kathy laughs, bright and false. It doesn’t quite cover the tension. Kevin balks, and when Neil looks down he sees that Rikka has used the distraction to inch towards Caith. Caith is twitching, but makes no move to get away from her. Pressed between Kevin and Riko, there’s nowhere to go.

Rikka lays a claw on Caith’s paw. To the audience, the gesture probably looks comforting. For the first time since Riko’s arrival, Neil’s attention is drawn offstage. Andrew’s eyes are wide, although with fury or mania Neil can’t tell with Renee’s hand still clamped over his mouth. Pinned by Wymack’s pitbull, Lexia’s claws glint in the reflection of the studio lights. When Rikka touches Caith, she tears her way from Atsila’s grip and scrabbles forwards.

Before she can reach them, Fìrinn lands back on the floor with a thud. She stalks forward, and Rikka is forced back. Lexia stops, watching as Fìrinn stands tall, a barrier between Caith and Rikka. Both stare at the hare as though she has grown an extra head. Slowly, Caith rises to her feet once more. She turns to Kevin and gives a small, measured nod.

Kevin clears his throat. “I would like to stay at Palmetto as long as they're willing to have me.”

The foxes cheer. Lexia sits, and if Neil didn’t know better he would describe her expression as triumphant.

The segment ends. The studio lights cut out.

Kevin moves as if preparing for more mandatory schmoozing with Kathy, but Caith drags him from the stage before she reaches him. Neil is right behind them.

As soon as they’re alone in the corridor, Fìrinn breaks into a run with Neil and Kevin close behind her. A flutter of wings is their only warning before a beak snaps around Fìrinn’s neck as Riko’s daemon swoops from the ceiling and pins her to the floor. Neil falls to his knees with a wheeze, his windpipe closing up in sympathy pain with his daemon.

Caith skids to a halt ahead of them, but Kevin does not, and he makes a noise like his chest has been pierced by something sharp as they struggle against each other, Kevin ready to run but Caith refusing to abandon Neil.

“Just go!” snaps Fìrinn, yelping when Rikka’s claws scrape in retribution. Red welts blossom across her fur. Neil reaches for his daemon, but it feels like a compressor is crushing his chest. He can do nothing but submit to Riko’s fury as he throws him against the wall.

“I do not approve, Kevin,” says Riko, voice deceptively even.

Kevin remains immobile, torn between his daemon and his need to run. Caith answers on his behalf.

“He’ll be court. I’m sure of it.” Her voice is quiet and shaking, but Neil believes her. He stares at Kevin’s daemon, trying to match the sincerity and confidence in Neil with the human so sharp and abrasive on the court.

Rikka relinquishes Fìrinn, but only so she can dive at Caith, claws first. It should be an easy fight – Caith is far bigger, with a good set of teeth to work with – but in a reflex that must have been beaten into her through years of abuse, she drops to the floor with a whine.

Rikka looks to be moments from scratching out one of Caith’s eyes when Fìrinn leaps into the fray. Neil watches the last of his survival instincts evaporate as they scuffle and takes the distraction to throw Riko off him. Riko rears back, expression black and unrecognisable, but before he can throw a punch Kevin appears at his arm, blocking the punch.

Riko and Rikka let out twin shouts of fury. Rikka throws herself into the air, and this time as she dives for her next victim it’s clear that she’s not aiming for the daemons. Before she can strike, a blur of patchy pink flies past them, pinning Rikka down. She thrashes violently, shrieking, and though Riko’s face barely twitches his skin turns ashen.

“Riko,” says Andrew as his daemon grapples with Rikka. He, too, barely reacts to the fight. “It’s been a while.”

Neil takes the distraction to scoop Fìrinn back into his arms, and if it were possible for Kevin to do the same with Caith he would.

Andrew’s attention remains upon Riko, but Caith turns to them and hisses, mouth wide and filled with teeth. Neil gets the hint and grabs Kevin by the arm, dragging them towards the exit.

When Andrew finds them minutes later, Lexia trails behind him, angry red claw-marks criss-crossing her skin. The few team members that show any concern quickly mask it or look away under Lexia’s glare. Andrew’s smile is wide and easy, but it drops away as Fìrinn approaches Lexia.

The team are busying themselves preparing to depart, but Andrew and Neil watch with equal surprise as Fìrinn stops in front of Lexia, nose twitching as she scans the Sphynx’s injuries. Neil senses that any physical contact would end with her face clawed open for the second time in as many minutes, but Fìrinn keeps the slimmest distance between them, ears twitching.

Neil tilts his head to one side and sends Andrew a puzzled look. Andrew meets it with careful blankness. When he passes Neil to board the bus, his hand grazes Neil’s back, the touch light enough to give Neil goosebumps. Fìrinn’s ears twitch, and he knows she feels it too.

They follow Andrew onto the bus. Lexia sits in the darkened parking lot a minute longer, glaring at Andrew through the windows as though making some sort of point, but eventually she follows them on board.

She spends the bus journey home watching Neil and Fìrinn from the adjacent seat while her human dozes at the back of the bus. Fìrinn watches back, and when Neil runs an exploratory hand through her fur to check for injuries, he finds her heartbeat as steady as he’s ever felt it.

He wants to question it, but he doubts that she would have an answer for him if he did. He leaves the two daemons to their silent vigils and spends the rest of the journey with his head pressed against the window, trying to erase the black look in Riko's eyes from his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coronavirus cancelled my classes so here I am back at it again on AO3
> 
> If anyone wants to send me prompts or requests on tumblr now would be a great time bc i have NOTHING TO DO ANYMORE  
> HELP
> 
> Next time: Andrew breaks a window.


	9. Tick Tock, Says the Clock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew makes Neil an offer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Neil remembers a physical encounter that he was not entirely comfortable with. Self-inflicted harm. References to past abuse.

In the aftermath of the interview, Andrew carries himself like a monolith of calm, stony and impenetrable. Lexia skitters ahead of him, and Neil can tell by the sound she makes against the linoleum that she has yet to retract her claws. She isn’t the most expressive nor sociable daemon by a long shot, yet humans and daemons alike part before her like they expect to lose an eye just for breathing. Andrew watches blankly as she darts ahead of them into the monsters’ suite, and her disappearance is followed by the sound of something breaking.

Andrew smiles placidly at them before following her in. There’s a further smash, a brief shout, and then silence.

The rest of the monsters follow hesitantly, and with the show over, Neil returns to his suite.

He finds Allison and Seth curled up on the couch in a state of undress. Neil’s eyes track the movement of Allison’s arm and realises it’s –

It’s running gently across Iisrar’s – Seth’s bulldog’s – fur, scratching the space between his ears. Allison sees Neil and draws her hand back, but she doesn’t look particularly ashamed of the action. Iisrar’s ears twitch, and she turns towards Neil, nose wrinkling at the sight of him. Neil quickly excuses himself.

His mother taught him that to lay hands on another’s daemon was invariably an act of unthinkable violation and violence. Neil knows that wasn’t what he witnessed between Seth and Allison was neither of the above.

 _He remembers a sweet Canadian girl with sticky sweet lip balm and long purple fingernails, kissing him awkwardly, tentatively. He remembers the uncomfortable boiling sensation in his gut, the_ no, no, no, _Fìrinn whispered at his back that he ignored, drawn in by sheer curiosity._

_“Can I see her?” the girl whispered. The young wolverine daemon wrapped around her ankles shimmered and shifted into a sparrow that fluttered to her shoulder, head cocked to one side. “She’s settled, isn’t she? What was it like?”_

_Fìrinn said something from inside Nathaniel’s rucksack that sounded suspiciously like_ fuck off _. Nathaniel bit his lip. The girl’s eyes were as bright and hopeful as her daemon’s, curious, but not in the way Neil had learned to fear._

_He slung his backpack from his shoulder and tugged at the zip until there was space for Fìrinn’s head to peep through._

_“Oh, hey, a rabbit.” The girl blushed. “You’re beautiful.” The sparrow edged along her shoulder, angling for a better look._

_Nathaniel cleared his throat, choking down the correction, hare. “Thanks.”_

_The girl kissed him again, and it was still awkward and uncomfortable, but he felt as though he was getting used to it, even if he still didn’t quite see what the fuss was about. He was still figuring out what to do with his hands, was about to place them on the safe expanse of her shoulders before he stopped, remembering her daemon’s place there._

_She broke the kiss, sensing his hesitance. Her cheeks were redder, somehow, as she cast a glance to where Fìrinn, who was watching, nose twitching. “We don’t mind, you know. If you want to.”_

_“What?” said Nathaniel. He felt like he had been saying that word a lot that day, starting with his classmate’s suggestion that they skip their geo class, following her lead to the deserted picnic benches around the back of the school to her insistence that he could sit closer to her than that, if he wanted to, to the look she fixed on him before finally rolling her eyes and pulling him in against her._

_“I mean, I trust you. You seem, like, really nice. I feel like we have a real connection, you know? So, if you wanted to, you could…”_

_Nathaniel looked at her blankly. He was so far out of his depth he was practically in the Marianas Trench._

_She rolled her eyes for the second time, pressed another wonky kiss against his lips, then reached for–_

_Fìrinn. She reached for Fìrinn, hand hovering inches from the tips of Fìrinn’s ears, and everything froze._

_Nathaniel let out a long, shaky breath as she waited for his reaction. Her hand was small and slender, fingernails painted purple, nothing like his fathers’. He couldn’t help the flash of memory the movement prompted, however, scarred, cruel hands that didn’t stop no matter how much Nathaniel screamed._

_Fìrinn threw herself deeper into the bag, and the moment ended._

_“Sorry,” said the girl. “I didn’t mean to…”_

_Nathaniel didn’t wait for the end of the sentence._

_He was still shaking when his mother came to collect him from school. She kept an iron grip on his shoulder as she walked them back to the studio they were renting by dubious means. As soon as the door was shut behind him, she pushed him down onto a chair and told him to spit it out, whatever it was. Nathaniel had learned to keep his expression neutral no matter what he was confronted with, but Fìrinn was easy to read. She developed a nervous tic whenever Nathaniel was hiding something from his mother._

_Nathaniel cracked immediately, told his mother about the girl, and the kiss, and the moment she had reached for Fìrinn._

_“I don’t understand,” he said, his voice low. “It wasn’t – she didn’t want to hurt me, I don’t think. It wasn’t like that. Why did she want to-?”_

_Fìrinn nuzzled into the side of Nathaniel’s leg, trying in vain to comfort him despite her own confusion. He raised a hand to run it through her fur, but the memory of the girl stilled his hand, and he let it fall into his lap instead._

_His mother’s fists were clenched, and Mairidh had wrapped himself so tightly around her forearm that his scales left her skin bleached in white rings in his wake. He let out a low, steady hiss as his mother processed Neil’s confession._

_She grabbed his collar tightly enough that it nearly choked him. “She was going to hurt you, Neil. You must never let – no matter how kind they seem, no matter how much they pretend you can trust them, never, ever let anyone touch your daemon. It’s taboo. You’re too young to understand, so I need you to trust me. You must never let anyone that close to you again.”_

_His mother had never been anything but deadly serious, but the darkness in her eyes seemed to fold in on itself as she spoke, and Nathaniel found himself nodding along. He took her words and folded them into himself, pulling Fìrinn tight against him. Afterwards, he paid more attention to people who seemed too interested in his daemon, those who looked at him in the same way the Canadian girl had. They were a new danger to guard against._

Neil lets out a slow breath. The memory of cherry lip-balm dissipates, and he’s back in the present.

Seth and Allison are by no means an example of a normal or balanced relationship, but Neil had never thought of their relationship as cruel or abusive. The point of contact between human and daemon had seemed…tender? Intimate? The words don’t fit right in Neil’s head.

He shakes his hands as though he can shake away the imagined sensation of another daemon in his grip until his breathing evens out. Neil has never known a thing about normal, not when it comes to people. It makes sense that his mother would have said anything to scare him away from girls. Maybe this is something that people just _do_ , too intimate to discuss in the company of others. Maybe he’s the one that’s wrong.

Neil reaches for Fìrinn and forces his movements to remain normal as he runs a hand through her fur.

“It isn’t like it matters, anyway,” she says, halfway between consolation and reprimand. “We’ll never have anything like that.”

Neil nods, breathing through his relief.

Nicky arrives at his suite a few minutes later to inform Neil that Andrew wants to see him. Seth and Allison are keeping their hands to themselves as Neil answers the door, and Nicky doesn’t even blink at the state of their undress.

He passes Aaron on the way to Andrew’s bedroom, sweeping up what Neil suspects was the victim of Lexia’s tantrum, muttering something disgruntled to the shape moving beneath his collar. He falls suddenly silent, glaring at Neil as he passes.

When Neil sees the smashed bedroom window, the first thing out of his mouth is, “why?”

Andrew flexes the fingers of his bloodied hand. “Someone needs to learn better than to throw temper tantrums.” He casts a dirty look to one of the bunks. Neil spots a pair of amber eyes glaring down at them from beneath the sheets of the upper bunk.

“She’s your daemon, not a misbehaving child,” Neil says with a sick taste in his mouth.

“I beg to differ.” Andrew’s gaze flicks to Neil at last. “Speaking of which.” He gestures to Fìrinn in what Neil has learned to recognise as a request to put her down.

Neil hesitates for a moment before setting Fìrinn opposite Andrew on the dresser he’s perched on. Andrew is many things, but strangely, Neil doesn’t see him as a threat, at least, not to Fìrinn. As if proving Neil’s point, Andrew scoots his feet back so that there’s a comfortable space between them.

Fìrinn is even more riled than Neil is. “You talk about her like she can’t even hear you. You punched through a window to punish her for feeling, even though that’s what daemons are _for_. But you’re only punishing yourself. Are you stupid, or suicidal?”

“Look at you, learning how to take a swing. I would applaud you, but…” Andrew waves his injured hand. A fleck of blood lands on the dresser. “In answer to your question, neither. I’m surviving. I’m sure you know what that looks like. Or perhaps not. How’s that target on your back feel?”

“Familiar.”

“So what is your plan? Run?”

“You know I will.”

“I know,” Andrew agreed. “The others think your daemon is a rabbit, nervous and twitchy and soft, but you and I know better, don’t we? Those are legs built for running.”

“And what is Lexia built for?” Neil deflects. “Not the cold, certainly.”

Andrew’s smile is half-lidded and dangerous. “Lots of cheap homes in California with no A/C. Go figure.”

“Cheap homes full of people worth clawing apart?”

Andrew points his cigarette in Neil’s direction. “Evasive.”

Neil turns, thinking that Andrew has finished. He finds Lexia between him and the door. She must have moved like a ghost, slipping down from the bed while Neil was focused on Andrew. A moment later Neil feels the huff of Andrew’s breath against the back of his neck as he speaks into his ear. “What would it take to make you stay?”

Lexia’s tale is flicking back and forth. Neil wonders for a second if he’s the mouse about to be pounced on. Her tantrum – as Andrew calls it – poses a lot of questions Neil can’t answer. He had assumed that Lexia seemed so blank and unresponsive due to a lack of feeling on Andrew’s part, but the tantrum that Andrew was quick to crush suggests otherwise. A wild undercurrent of emotion that Andrew is tampering down on with everything he can, a vice-like grip on his emotions even through the haze of his medication. Neil wonders what happens when Andrew can’t hold back the fire burning within him any longer.

He wonders what it would take to make Andrew show him.

“We will stand between you and the Moriyamas,” says Andrew. “Give your back to me.”

Neil tries to walk away, but Fìrinn stays squarely in place. He turns and fixes her with a panicked look. He takes a step towards the door. The bond between them pulls painfully, like a mess of hooks embedded in Neil’s chest about to be ripped out, but she shows no sign of backing down. Neil isn’t sure when it happened, but the foxes have quite literally taken his soul. He has until they leave for Eden’s to make his decision, but it’s clear that Fìrinn has already made up her mind.

Fìrinn looks to Andrew, who has been watching the exchange with quirking lips. “I’m a hare,” she tells him. “Not a rabbit.”

“Could have fooled me.” Andrew twists the cap of his pills off with his bloodied hand. “Tick tock, says the clock. Get out of my room.”

Neil leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since last posting I've been put on lockdown. Unsurprisingly this has done wonders for my productivity. 
> 
> For anyone who is interested, I've been discussing some of my decisions RE: Andrew and Neil's daemon forms [here](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/613775827382960128/ok-but-hares-are-hella-ugly-and-big-couldnt) (and posting pictures!). Send me an ask if you want image refs/discussions for any other characters! Content relating to this fic will be tagged TSATH (don't ask me how it's pronounced tho...)


	10. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "This is the moment you stop being the rabbit"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: mentions of death, moderate gore

Neil tries to run. He tries like his life depends on it.

He throws the few belongings he’s left scattered around his room into his rucksack and makes it as far as the door before Fìrinn digs her heels in, yanking him back as though she has hooked a noose around his neck.

They’ve never fought like this before, not so brutally. He tries without success to keep moving forwards, dragging her with him through the force of their bond, but it ends with Neil doubled over on the floor and wheezing. He blinks the spots from his vision and tries a harsher approach, snatching her up in his arms. She kicks viciously, strong legs smacking into Neil’s chest hard enough to bruise. He may be stupid, but he isn’t self-destructive; he drops Fìrinn before they can do any real damage to each other. She tumbles onto Neil’s bed, quivering with fury.

“We can’t,” Neil says. “We really, really can’t.”

“Ever since we got here that’s all you’ve been saying,” Fìrinn snaps. Neil straightens automatically; she never speaks like this, not to him. “We might not survive this, but we won’t survive leaving it. You can keep fighting me, keep protesting this, keep pretending there’s anything like a life for us beyond the walls of the Exy court. We both know it isn’t true, so don’t…” she stops, breath hitching, not quite a sob, but close. “Don’t make us give this up,” she whispers, and Neil’s resolve breaks.

Andrew’s smile is small and fierce when Neil returns to his room several hours later. He squats to be on level with Fìrinn, who, for once, doesn’t even twitch under the scrutiny.

“Remember this feeling. This is the moment you stop being the rabbit.”

Neil is too startled to reply as Andrew tugs him out of the way of the doorway by his wrist. Fìrinn still doesn’t move, not even when Lexia follows him. The daemons stare at each other for a long moment before Lexia brushes past her, and Neil swears he feels the light contact in the core of his being. For all her icy demeanour, Lexia’s vulnerable, hairless skin burns with hidden heat.

Once again, she leads the way at Eden’s, and the crowd melts before her like wax before a flame. Neil ends up pressed against Andrew at the bar while Lexia stalks off to the table with the rest of the monsters. He can see them through the crowded dance floor, just, and when Neil is shouldered into Andrew’s chest, Lexia’s reaction is visceral. While Andrew shows no acknowledgment of the proximity, his daemon’s entire body twitches like the contact sent a bolt of energy straight through her. Only Kevin seems to notice, flashing a glance in the direction of the bar before his eyes slide in glazed fashion to the rows of bottles behind them.

“Have you decided on your price?” Andrew drawls while they wait for their drinks.

“Protection from my past,” says Neil. He places Fìrinn on the counter before them, and with Andrew so close she shows no sign of discomfort at being left so exposed.

“Boring, predictable, but easy enough to take care of.”

Neil is jostled against Andrew by a group of dancers, but Andrew doesn’t budge an inch under his weight, violent and fierce and unmoving. Neil moves to pick up Fìrinn before heading over to their table, but Andrew stops him, fingers hooking in the cuff of his sleeve.

“You’re not hiding anymore, remember? Time to let her stand on her own feet.”

“You really think you can protect me?” says Fìrinn.

Andrew’s eyes narrow on her. “Nicky should have explained this already. You’re one of ours, which means nobody touches you again. You’ve given up on running, hare. So, stand.”

Andrew leaves them at the bar without looking back.

“…again. He said again. How did he know?” Fìrinn says after a moment.

Neil shrugs wordlessly.

After a moment’s hesitation that lasts an eternity, Fìrinn drops from the bar to the grimy floor. Neil can feel her apprehension crawling over him like it’s a second skin as she looks at the sea of legs ahead of her. He itches to scoop her into his arms, but he knows without looking that Andrew is watching them from the table, testing Neil’s trust in him.

Fìrinn starts, and when Neil looks down, he sees Lexia sitting in front of her. She tilts her head to one side, urging Fìrinn onwards, and she and Neil find their way through the crowd with Lexia watching their backs.

Fìrinn is sitting in the footwell of Andrew’s car when his phone rings, and when news of Seth’s death breaks the shiver passes straight from her body to Neil’s. Neither of them are strangers to death; he remembers watching the daemon of a man his father spent hours bleeding dry burst into a shower of dust before his eyes. Neil had held his breath for as long as he could, but for days afterwards he imagined feeling a thin film of dust coating the inside of his mouth, closing up his throat. His father’s daemon, a thin-faced greyhound called Furia, proceeded to tear into what remained of the man’s body until her fur was matted with blood and nothing but scraps remained. The butcher and his hound, well-matched in their white-hot bloodlust.

Perhaps that’s why he feels so strangely detached from the news. He can tell from the slight twitch of Fìrinn’s ears that she’s thinking of Iisrar, Seth’s bulldog, but she still processes the news with a calm acceptance that the other daemons in the car do not. Only Lexia is as unresponsive. She has crushed herself under Andrew’s seat, clearly eager to put as much distance between herself and her human as possible without forcing herself any closer to the car’s other occupants. Only the gold glint from beneath the car seat betrays her ever-steady gaze.

Neil catches up with Andrew on the front porch, who is lighting a cigarette and watching as the rest of the monsters stumble past him into the house.

“That doesn’t bode well for your sanity.” Andrew gestures to Fìrinn. She’s standing by the car still, watching Lexia skulk around the undercarriage. Neil realises with a jolt that it’s the furthest she’s ever willingly been from him in memory. He’s disconcerted that it’s Andrew’s daemon, of all things, which drew her away. That’s not what Andrew’s referring to, though; he’s referring to their blatant apathy regarding Seth’s death.

“What’s that saying about glass houses?” Neil plucks Andrew’s cigarette from his fingers without thinking. For some reason, Andrew lets him.

“I don’t feel for anyone or anything. Seth was not the exception.”

Neil glances from Andrew to the shadow of his daemon, barely visible beneath the car. He thinks it’s his turn in their truth game, wonders if Andrew is willing to play. “Is that why you keep your distance from Lexia? Or is it the other way around?”

Something flashes behind Andrew’s eyes; if Neil didn’t know better, he’d call it surprise. “Is there a difference?”

“I don’t know. Is there?” Neil can’t explain why the answer is as important to him as it is. He’s spent months watching Andrew skirting the edges of his own soul. The closest he ever came to believing there was something more to them than stony indifference was the bone-deep understanding that burned beneath his gaze when Neil told him he was tired of being nothing. Neil wants it again, or wants more, or wants – something. Wants to know if there’s really something beneath all Andrew and Lexia’s layers of hostility and disinterest.

“Call it an exercise in control,” Andrew says eventually.

Neil doesn’t know how to respond. Daemons aren’t meant to be controlled. They’re meant to be _felt_. Andrew pushes Lexia away because he wants to shut out feeling entirely. And, somehow, it works.

Or it appears to, at least. Neil turns to see Lexia has appeared between them, sitting at Andrew’s feet as she stares up at Neil. Her eyes are on the cigarette still in his hand. Something else flashes behind Andrew’s eyes, something that isn’t quite fear but isn’t quite not.

“Maybe I want to see you lose control,” Neil says to her quietly. She blinks back at him.

Andrew takes back the cigarette, puts it between his lips, and places a warm key into Neil’s empty palm.

“Get some sleep,” Andrew says in a voice that isn’t quite as even as it used to be. “We’re going home tomorrow.”

He leaves Neil on the porch, breathing in the last of his cigarette smoke.

“Welcome home, Neil,” says Fìrinn. She says the words like she’s been waiting for them all her life. They turn and follow Andrew into the house together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nathan's Greyhound: Furia. Polish. Meaning fury.
> 
> New bonus content! Pictures of Kevin and Matt's daemons [here.](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/614824725757214720/hello-i-was-wondering-if-you-could-show-us-what) Send me a character for more daemon pics!  
> Visual representation of Neil trying to get his daemon under control [here.](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/614400347195228160/lmao-homeboy-struggled-idk-who-he-is-but-i-love) (lmao)


	11. Settled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the start of The Raven King, something a little different.
> 
> Andrew and Aaron, from the beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ***IMPORTANT***  
> This chapter contains a scene from Andrew's adolescence which some may find triggering. Please proceed with caution.  
> *Content warnings*: Physical & domestic abuse, unwanted physical contact, implicit sexual assault, references to drug abuse.

It all starts on a sticky, hot day in Oakland. Aaron is standing at the concession stand, wavering listlessly between corn dogs and Slurpees as though he gives a shit, when a cop walks up to him and changes his life forever.

“Andrew?” The man’s eyes skate across Aaron, around him, and his face whitens. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

His words startle Ledie from Aaron’s shoulder. She changes mid-fall from spider to moth, fluttering behind Aaron like he’s her shield. The movement seems to baffle the officer even further.

“Your daemon – I don’t – That’s impossible. What the hell happened to Lexia?”

“What?” Aaron scans the crowd for any sign of his mother and comes up empty. The guy doesn’t look high, but it isn’t always easy to tell. Aaron would know. 

“She was settled. She settled years ago. What is going on?!”

The cop asks to meet Aaron’s mother, and it only gets worse from there.

*

Andrew reads the letter his long-lost twin wrote him only once, although to be fair, that’s all it ever takes. He hands it to Lexia, and she shreds it immediately, claws flashing.

That should be the end of it. In a fair world, it would be. Andrew stopped believing in fair a long, long time ago.

Of course the pig opens his mouth to his bestest buddy, Andrew’s soon-to-be adoptive brother. Andrew would say that it all went to hell then and there if he hadn’t already been more than acquainted with the place.

Drake’s hand is all rough and wrong as he pulls it across Lexia’s skin. She doesn’t have fur to protect her; his skin against hers is nauseating. “Don’t be a spoil-sport, AJ. If you played nice, we could have a little fun. All three of us.”

Lexia’s claws unsheathe, but Drake has learned all her tricks. He crushes her under his hand in a second, and doesn’t react to the scrape of her claws across his arm. The sensation is unbearable; Andrew drops like a sack of bricks. Brick, that’s what he needs to become, from the inside out. If he can brick Lexia out, then he doesn’t have to feel this, doesn’t have to feel her pain.

If anyone gave him the option, he would never have a daemon at all. He would drift away, sensationless and uncaring, and nobody would ever be able to hurt him again.

Eventually, Drake gives up on persuading Andrew. After all, Cass is far easier to convince. She writes to Aaron in her typical warm fashion, trying to organise a reunion between them. By the time Andrew hears about the letter, it’s already well on its way to reaching the boy who happens to share his face.

Andrew will die before he lets that reunion happen. No…

Andrew will _kill_.

And that really _should_ be the end of it.

*

Aaron looks at the boy sitting across from him. The boy with his face.

There’s no recognition. They share everything. They share nothing.

Ledie noses forwards. She hasn’t been settled long. It came as a shock to Aaron, somehow, even though it had been a long time coming. His mom’s anxiety and irritability had built and built as the reunion drew closer, and then –

The morning after she finally snapped, Aaron woke up, studied the deep ring of black around his eye, and when he looked back to his daemon, she was –

He felt it in his chest, something compressing and folding in on itself. Folding itself up small enough that it could pass unnoticed under his mother’s newfound violence.

People tended to underestimate Aaron. With this daemon form, they would do so even more.

He could make that work in his favour.

_Mus musculus._ House mouse.

Aaron scooped Ledie into the safety of his pocket, and there she stayed. Until today.

He lets her down on the floor, and she looks at Lexia’s towering form with trepidation.

“Careful,” says Andrew sharkishly. “She’s hungry.”

Daemons don’t eat. It’s a stupid joke.

“The pig said yours wasn’t settled.”

“It’s new.” Aaron doesn’t understand why Andrew cares, or even remembers; he didn’t seem to give two shits about Aaron, so why would he care about Aaron’s daemon?

“As new as this?” With vicious speed, Andrew prods a sharp finger into the soft, fresh bruising around Aaron’s eye. “I thought so,” he says when Aaron doesn’t answer.

Aaron’s daemon may be a mouse, but he’s no coward. Mice aren’t timid; they’re quick, cunning, and know how to hide. They can skirt the corners of the most unwelcoming homes and eke out a living for themselves. His point is that he isn’t afraid of Andrew, and neither is Ledie. While the humans may be strangers to each other, the daemons study each other intently, recognising something that was either written in their DNA or beaten into them over years. A kind of common ground.

Ledie gets too close to Andrew’s daemon. Lexia snaps forwards, chasing her away with a toothy hiss, and Ledie rushes back into the safety of Aaron’s clothes.

“I would keep her close, if I were you.” In any other mouth, the words would sound threatening. In Andrew’s, they fall too flat. Somewhere between advice and a warning. “There’s all kinds out there.”

He isn’t wrong, as Aaron will learn.

*

Andrew has made a deal, and he intends to keep it. Nobody touches Aaron, nobody touches his daemon. Consensually or otherwise. It’s not the specific brand of abuse that Tilda goes in for, but any brand of abuse is a no-no in Andrew’s book. She may not hurt little Ledie, but she hurts little Aaron, alright. All the same, Aaron keeps his daemon zipped away like the clever boy he is. Andrew will be having words if he does otherwise; no need to make Andrew’s job harder than it already is.

Tilda’s daemon is a rodent too. How ironic. Bigger than Aaron’s, not a mouse, no, but still smaller than Lexia by far.

Andrew contemplates how easy it would be for Lexia’s jaws to snap shut around the little pest’s neck. There would be no blood, of course. Daemons don’t bleed. Andrew doesn’t care either way; what he does not have is bloodlust, no. It is a sense of justice, if somewhat warped.

Of course, that route would mean involving his daemon in his actions, a vulnerability Andrew has long sworn off. No, he is going to settle this human to human, assuming, of course, that Tilda even qualifies as one.

He opens the car door for her. She gets in.

He smiles.

*

Andrew only means to knock Nicky’s assailants down long enough for him to pick up his cousin and drag them back to the safety of the bar.

Lexia, of course, stupid, stupid daemon. She has other ideas.

“They’re going to declaw you for this,” he tells her later, when she’s licking off the grime and the blood. “No more kibble for you.”

“No. They’re going to declaw _you_.”

It’s the last time they speak for a long, long time.

*

“What seems to be the problem, Officer… Higgins, you said?” Wymack says, unaware of the bomb he just dropped in their lap. Aaron’s head snaps up. It’s been years, but he still remembers their chance encounter as though he had borrowed Andrew’s memory for the day.

He watches as his brother wrestles the phone from Wymack’s grasp. Lexia, who has been pacing along the mirrors that wall one side of the changing room, goes very, very still.

Aaron tries not to think about his brother’s freakshow of a relationship with his daemon. As far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t need to know. There are some facts, however, that are so stark that not even complete indifference can block them out.

Andrew keeps his daemon at a distance because Andrew doesn’t like to feel.

That’s why it’s so surprising to see Lexia’s reaction as Andrew hangs up on the cop for the third and final time. Today, against Andrew’s wishes, something is breaking through the walls between them. Something big enough to reach Andrew’s shrivelled, abandoned heart.

Back arched, hackles raised, a low hiss rattles through her bony ribcage. Andrew looks as startled as the rest of them.

He turns to Wymack. “I think I’m coming down with something. Cough, cough. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Kevin tries to stop Andrew from leaving. He’s stupid like that.

Caith nearly gets her face clawed off for her trouble, and Andrew reacts to Kevin – or maybe to Lexia’s outburst – with unbridled fury. He puts his fist through the wall, and both Lexia and Caith are startled into submission.

Andrew leaves, his daemon following unwillingly behind. Since the phone call ended, she has not re-sheathed her claws.

“Something’s wrong with him.” Ledie’s voice comes unbidden from the folds of Aaron’s outer shirt.

“What else is new?” Aaron snaps. It isn’t like he cares about Andrew’s business, no matter what Ledie says.

The truth is, with Andrew, he will never know where to start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiding a rodent in your clothing? You could make a Pixar movie out of this!
> 
> Aaron's house mouse: Ledie. Combination of Lene (meaning child of light, bitter*) and Gerdie (meaning protected*). German.  
> *According to slightly untrustworthy websites, but I liked it anyway.
> 
> [Image refs for Nathan's (scary ass) daemon](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/615864674567798784/p-also-furia-means-fury-in-italian-too-so-it) Send me any other characters you wanna see daemons for!
> 
> This A/N is out of control already BUT this fic hit triple figures for subscriptions at some point and I just wanted to thank y'all for that real quick. So, THANK YOU!


	12. If You Can't Say Something Nice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The banquet and the Ravens

They’re twenty minutes out from the banquet when Caith loses the last of her calm.

Kevin’s daemon has been statue-still by his side for the entire bus ride, betrayed only by the occasional nervous twitch of her stubby tail. The first sign they pass pointing to Blackwell is the final straw, it seems, and Caith is up on all fours, hackles raised. Neil has never heard her bark outside of an Exy court before; she’s a big daemon, but he’s still stunned by the volume of noise that raps from her chest as panic sets in.

There’s no one else on Neil’s aisle to catch the way he curls in on himself, hands pressing into his ears. His father’s daemon barked too. It was the first indicator that Nathan’s temper was about to snap in terrifically violent manner. Fìrinn buries her head into Neil’s side as though she can hide from the sound in the folds of his jacket. Caith’s panic is contagious, shown by the twitch of her legs, like she’s preparing to run for it.

Kevin’s panic is quieter than that of his daemon. A lifetime of media training has made him well equipped to build up a charming public façade, but such tricks are never effective when it comes to one’s daemon, a fact which Neil is all too aware of from his years of lying and hiding.

Caith is cut off mid-bark as Kevin hooks a hand around her neck and pulls her back to him. Neil isn’t close enough to catch what he hisses to her, but his tone is anything but friendly. The harder he tries to quash his daemon’s terror, the worse it becomes, Caith snapping and backing away from him until she’s out of Kevin’s reach. Judging from the way Kevin’s hand snaps to his chest, it’s more distance than he’s used to. Neil never noticed before – maybe because his own proximity issues with Fìrinn made theirs pale in comparison – but Caith never strays very far from Kevin’s side. Side by side, they are able to appear larger and more intimidating. Apart, Kevin looks smaller, more vulnerable, and so does his daemon. It’s strange, considering how far Riko’s daemon is confident in flying from her human in contrast – Neil remembers how she all but lapped the stage at Kathy’s interview before landing by Kevin’s shoulder. Neil wonders what they did to Kevin to make his daemon so afraid to leave his side.

Maybe if he’s lucky, he can ask Riko in person.

Andrew passes Neil’s aisle on the way to Kevin’s seat. His eyes flicker to Fìrinn, who is still clearly agitated by Caith’s distress, and then away, as though he’s admonishing himself for looking. More and more often, Andrew has been looking to Neil’s daemon instead of to Neil himself. But only briefly, as though he’s catching himself in the nick of time.

Andrew reassures Kevin and Caith in his own strangely threatening way until they both begin to act like people again.

Andrew is no match for vodka in terms of settling Kevin’s nerves, and with a terrifying amount in his system Kevin seems closer to his usual, if tipsy, self. Caith, on the other hand, continues to walk like she expects with every step that her paw will land in a beartrap.

Dan’s fox leads the way into the banquet, declaring the arrival of the fox team better than any announcement could have. Azu stops dead, however, lips tugging into a low snarl at the sight of the seating arrangements despite Dan’s calm lead. Caith nearly runs straight into him, but similarly freezes at the sight of the table of Ravens awaiting them.

They’re a veritable aviary of tight-lipped smiles and fluttering daemons, all of which are perched on the right shoulder of their humans like they’ve been glued there. They aren’t all raven-form, of course, but all are bird form at the very least. Their uniformity is strange to the point of surreal; daemons aren’t supposed to be corralled into positions like that. They’re supposed to move as they please, not controlled and restrained.

In comparison to the Raven’s daemons, Caith is large, gangly, out of place. Neil is uncomfortable enough, and he has only been in their presence for a matter of seconds. He can’t imagine spending a lifetime surrounded by people so viciously uniform in a way Kevin could never hope to be. He had been set up to fail from the beginning.

It goes a long way to explaining why Kevin is so harsh on Caith, and himself by extension. He treats her the way the Ravens taught him to.

Caith only starts moving again when Azu nips at her ankles. Dan is a little kinder as she leads Kevin and the rest of them towards the table, her body language deceptively open as she shakes Riko’s hand.

The man who sits in front of Neil is easily identified by the black _3_ carved into his gaunt cheekbone. The bird on his shoulder is some kind of songbird, smaller than the other daemons in contrast with Jean’s looming presence. Her feathers are ruffled along one side, and her left wing sits oddly along her body, almost bent out of shape. Neil drops his gaze quickly, but he can tell by the crease in Jean’s expression that he saw Neil looking.

Fìrinn drums one foot against the carpeted court floor in agitation. Although she reacted with outrage to the repurposed court, this is not the current source of her agitation. Jean’s daemon is so still she could have been stuffed, and Fìrinn has picked up on her discomfort at being on display. For a daemon who has spent most of her life hiding in one way or another, the idea of being forced into the open is sickening, even if Fìrinn had as little choice in the matter as Jean’s songbird does.

When Jean rattles off a list of Neil’s former names as easy as breathing, it’s all Neil can do to keep Fìrinn from bolting from her place under the table.

“It’s Neil,” Neil corrects stiffly, pretending that he isn’t having a furious kicking match with his daemon beneath the pristine white tablecloth.

“And with you is…?” Jean sends a pointed look downwards just as Fìrinn bursts out from beneath the tablecloth. She blinks up at the table’s occupants as though she forgot they were there.

There’s a few mutters from the Foxes’ side of the table. Asking for a daemon’s name when it has not been offered is a serious breach of etiquette, one that even Neil’s nosiest and most confrontational teammates have not breached. Neil had assumed the lack of questioning was down to disinterest, but their sounds of outrage tell a more compassionate story. The Foxes hadn’t wanted to push him into something he wasn’t ready for, and now Jean is doing it for them, in front of everyone. He knows that Neil’s daemon can’t lie. It’s a trap, to lure Neil into giving away a fragment of his truth.

He feels like he’s being pulled apart by their gazes, until Andrew steps in. “Hey, Jean. Jean Valjean. Hey. Hey. Hello.”

Jean’s daemon, who has been still as stone until this point, flutters in a panic as Andrew crushes Jean’s hand in a vicious handshake. Jean himself gives no reaction.

His retaliation comes in the form of taunting the foxes’ capabilities, and his teammates are quick to join. It’s the wrong tack to take to annoy Andrew, but despite Dan’s stony demeanour her fox snaps viciously as though the insult was to him personally.

“Your garbage rat is rabid,” says the Raven girl at Jean’s side. “About time it was put down. Then again, it represents your team so beautifully, does it not?”

“Probably has fleas,” says another Raven in a thick Russian accent, wrinkling his nose. “Did you ever hear something like that? A daemon having fleas?”

“Unsurprising,” says a third, “Just think of the places he’s been.” He leans forward, leering, to click his fingers at Azu like he’s an alley cat. “Come on, I’m just being friendly. Rumour has it, you like to play dirty.”

Azu snaps at him, close enough that the Raven almost loses a finger. Dan pulls him back into her lap with one hand while forcing Matt back into his seat with the other. “Enough,” says Dan, still the level captain she always is despite the clear fury of her daemon. Neil can’t believe how well she is holding it together for all that must be coursing from Azu to her. Years of dealing with cruelty and insults from foxes and media alike have given her more strength than Neil can imagine. More than enough to deal with Raven disrespect. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. That goes for both teams.”

“Is that why your new child is being so quiet?” Riko says, gesturing to Neil. Rikka, the only daemon apparently exempt from the Raven’s strict synchronicity, flutters down from Riko’s shoulder to land on the table in front of Neil. It’s too close for comfort, and the vicious glint in her eyes tells him that she knows it. Neil fights the urge to lean back in his seat.

Matt’s daemon writhes under his arm as though she is moments from snapping Rikka’s neck in her jaw. Neil is quietly grateful that Fìrinn is still skulking around his ankles. As difficult as it is having her out of sight, she is at least out of the way of Riko’s hungry eyes. Neil lost track of Lexia shortly after they entered the room, but he suspects that the slightest threat to Fìrinn will have Andrew’s daemon bolting into the fray. It’s alarming, the amount of trust Neil has started to place her, but that’s a concern for another time.

“We are _speaking_ to you.” Rikka hops forwards until it feels like she’s taking over Neil’s entire field of vision, painting it glistening black. “And where is the little rabbit? What might she be hiding from?”

“What a coward,” says Riko, “Just like their mother.”

There’s a thump heavy enough to rattle crockery the length of the table as Fìrinn leaps onto it. Rikka scampers backwards, her only alternative being crushed under Fìrinn’s quivering form.

“Jesus, she’s feral,” says a Raven, who moves too late to catch his toppling wine glass. “Get her under control!”

“I’m good, thanks,” says Neil. Blood is pounding in his ears, but he places a hand on Fìrinn’s back encouragingly. “Got something to say, buddy?”

Fìrinn, it turns out, has a lot to say. “You know, I get it. Being a superstar must be really, really difficult for you. Always a commodity, never a human being, parading your ratty little crow around and calling her a raven like it’ll make your family think you’re worth a damn. Caith and I talk about your intricate and endless Daddy issues all the time.”

Caith whines, ears pressed flat against her head. Her fear spurns Neil to join in. “I know it’s not entirely your fault that you are mentally unbalanced and infected with these delusions of grandeur. It must have been a _real_ strain spending every night trying to warp your daemon into something your uncle wouldn’t disown you for, it’s just a shame that it left you physically incapable of holding a decent conversation like any other normal human being can. I don’t think any of us should have to put up with this much of your bullshit and pity only gets you so many concessions. You used yours up about six insults ago.”

“So please, _please_ ,” Fìrinn finishes for him, “Shut the fuck up and leave us alone.”

Jaws drop up and down the table. Raven symmetry shatters as several daemons squawk or take flight while their humans stare at Neil in stupefied disbelief. At the other end of the table, Matt’s daemon cackles heartily, and while Dan’s head is in her hands, Azu beams with pride.

That more or less puts an end to the conversation.

Atsila appears a moment later with Wymack at her heels, rounding up the Foxes and briskly ushering them away from the Ravens as though she were a sheepdog instead of a Pitbull.

They’re soon safely out of earshot of the Ravens, but that doesn’t stop Jean passing his last message through. He speaks briefly to the bird at his shoulder, and unnoticed by the other Foxes, she darts between humans and daemons on unsteady wings to land between Caith and Fìrinn. Neil can’t hear what she says to them, but their reaction is instantaneous.

A full-body shudder rolls through Caith for all of two seconds before she burst into a volley of frantic barking. Jean’s daemon takes the distraction to return to her human, who is watching from several feet away with dark eyes.

Neil may not have heard the exchange, but he recognises the all-consuming, burning mix of fear and revulsion that shakes through Fìrinn. It is not the run-of-the-mill background panic that characterises Neil’s life; this is a specific terror. The same terror that shakes through them both when Neil wakes from a nightmare with the memory of his father’s hands around his neck.

Neil expects Fìrinn to leap into the safety of his arms, as she usually does in such moments. Instead, she charges Caith.

“Shut up! Shut up!” she snaps, her tone strident enough to draw the attention of the others. It isn’t an attack born of violence, but necessity; she smacks into Caith like a furry bowling ball, trying to knock her from her panic by force.

Both Atsila and Azu are quick to break the two apart. When Caith relays Jean’s message to her human, his skin turns ashen.

Kevin storms forward to take Neil’s chin in his hand, turning his face back and forth. His eyes burn with recognition.

“Jean says that you’re – That your father is-!” Kevin chokes on the words, and Neil’s worst suspicions are confirmed.

“Not here,” Neil hisses in French. “Not now.”

Kevin’s eyes slide to their abandoned table, and it takes Neil a moment to see what has drawn his attention. Lexia is weaving between the deserted plates. Every few places she stops to knock a glass from the table. She watches as each smashes or rolls across the floor with disinterest. It won’t be long until a member of staff notices, although whether they’ll be bold enough to object is yet to be seen.

“Does Andrew know?” Kevin says at last. The man himself is watching them at a distance, not understanding the language but picking up on the urgent tone.

“Parts of it. Not my name. Not…” He can’t bring himself to say Fìrinn’s name out loud, not in any language. He hasn’t spoken it since his mother died, and in some ways he feels as though his daemon’s name died with her. “Hers,” Neil finishes lamely, nodding to Fìrinn.

Kevin nods, seemingly agreeing to let the matter drop for now. Before leaving, however, he stoops to Fìrinn’s level. Kevin has never shown much interest in Neil’s daemon before now beyond her speed on the court, but now he looks at her with recognition.

“You weren’t settled last time,” he says. “But you were faster than all of us.”

It’s the first time Kevin and Fìrinn have spoken beyond screaming insults at each other. Neil doesn’t expect Fìrinn to reply, but Neil should have given up on expecting Fìrinn to behave as expected as soon as she dragged him to Palmetto. “You remember me,” she says quietly.

Neil remembers why he was so drawn to Kevin over the years, why he filled his binder with all the clippings and articles he could lay hands on. Kevin was a part of his history, proof that Neil was real, had once been a person. But for Fìrinn, who had only settled after their life on the run began, there was nothing that remained of her past life. Until now.

“You took a good form,” says Kevin. It’s the most genuine comment he has ever given either of them. Neil tries to take it for what it was, and not an indication of Kevin’s crumbling psyche.

While Coach Moriyama takes Kevin aside to examine his hand, Riko drags Neil off to the locker room for a private chat. The following argument leaves Fìrinn with a few more claw marks than she had when the night began, but there’s still a satisfaction in seeing Rikka’s feathers well and truly ruffled.

Neil stops outside the court walls as he returns from their aside, watching the Foxes through the plexiglass walls. As much as he doesn’t want to believe Riko’s revelations about his father and the Moriyamas, they came straight from Rikka’s beak. She spat them with cruel fury, incensed by Neil’s disrespect.

But daemons speak the truth, and the truth is that Neil is in far more danger than he imagined. Fìrinn may be pawing at the glass walls as though desperate to be back on the other side of them, but Neil is planning out every step necessary to get him back to his binder and out of the country.

He turns towards the exit to find Lexia waiting at his back. Neil glances over his shoulder to see Andrew still within the court walls, standing at Kevin’s side at a distance that should have been impossible.

Neil sinks to his knees before her. “Andrew promised he would protect me. You didn’t. Why are you here?”

He isn’t sure why he bothered to ask; Lexia doesn’t answer to anyone. Not even Andrew.

Somehow, she knew Neil was planning to run. She also seems to know the second Neil changes his mind.

He heads back towards the court doors, not catching the quick words Fìrinn throws her way. He waits in the doorway, one hand holding the door ajar. Laughter and the smell of wine float through the gap. “Are you coming back in with us?”

“She’s coming,” says Fìrinn with confidence as she slides past Neil’s ankles.

She’s right; Lexia slinks in after them just before the door clangs shut.

“Oh, Neil came back,” says Andrew. There’s a trace of genuine surprise behind his words as Neil joins the rest of the foxes. “I didn’t think you would.”

“I was persuaded otherwise,” Neil replies in German. He glances behind him to where Lexia is waiting, seemingly standing guard at his back. “Someone knows me a little too well.”

“Concerning,” Andrew says. He leans around Neil to send his daemon a flat look. “Interfering little shit.” It’s unclear who he is addressing.

“She’s the only reason I’m not halfway to Mexico right now. Maybe show her some gratitude.”

“Die,” says Andrew brightly.

“Later,” Neil replies with a yawn.

When the Foxes leave the court at last, Lexia and Fìrinn trail at the back, apparently wrapped up in a wordless conversation.

Neil should probably be worried. But on a list of concerns that includes mafia, murder and Moriyamas, his daemon’s strange impulses are dead last.

Neil spends the ride home thinking about Riko, his father, and the strange, amber eyes that told Neil without words to stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Changing a single line of the Riko Roast (tm) was genuinely painful. It deserves to be in the MOMA.
> 
> Also shoutout to AO3 user Vertigo (beta-lactamase on tumblr) for (1) giving me some fascinating info on mice to use RE: Aaron's daemon but also for (2) making [this HYSTERICAL edit](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/617747520759775232/thank-you-so-much-beta-lactamase-who-made-this) of Neil trying to identify other people's daemons


	13. Every Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kevin makes Neil a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: references to abuse

Neil wakes up the morning after the banquet with a bad taste in his mouth. Maybe it’s just a side-effect of Wymack’s apartment, which is packed with enough dirty dishes and dusty surfaces to choke up anyone’s lungs.

Atsila is curled up in a furry black ball by Wymack’s feet when Neil enters the kitchen. She raises her head when Neil enters, and doesn’t miss Neil and Fìrinn’s identical twitches when they spot her. Months in proximity have done little to soften Neil’s reaction to Atsila or her human.

Neil silently counts to ten in a roulette of languages as he takes a seat, but Atsila’s gaze does not move from him. Upon running out of languages, he changes tack, mentally listing all the differences between Wymack’s daemon and his father’s. Stout and burly instead of sleek and swift. Round, brown eyes instead of piercing amber. Atsila walks like she’s feeling the brunt of Wymack’s age on her shoulders, and a few other things besides. Unlike her brusque, blunt human, however, Atsila has been nothing but gentle in her every movement since Neil has known her. Nathan and Furia were their opposites in every way, Neil’s father painting the perfect picture of a polite and well-meaning businessman to draw attention away from the daemon snapping and snarling at his side.

“You are not what we expected, Neil,” says Atsila. Wymack sets his paper down, eyebrow quirking at his daemon’s sudden announcement.

Fìrinn quivers. Neither of them are fans of such expressions. They’re proof that Neil’s constructed persona is falling apart. Which, invariably, means attention, suspicion, and ultimately, death.

“You’re happy to go up against Riko Moriyama at the slightest provocation, but you can’t stand to be in a room with me,” Atsila continues. Neil drops his gaze immediately. He had hoped he had hidden his discomfort better than that, at least some of it. He’s careful to stay still as Atsila climbs to her feet. “I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”

Wymack makes a disgruntled noise. “Leave the kid be.”

“I’m helping.”

“Ever the optimist.”

Neil wants to leave Wymack and his daemon to their bickering, but Atsila has a point. He can’t keep skirting the edges of his triggers forever. “Why…” Neil begins, before choking on the question. Wymack and Atsila fall silent.

“Why a Pitbull?” Fìrinn finishes for him.

“Something wrong with Pitbulls?” Wymack sounds more curious than defensive, but Neil still can’t help but twitch.

Atsila shakes her head at her human before clarifying for him. “Someone who looks like me hurt you. Am I wrong?”

Neil lays a hand on Fìrinn’s back. “Yes,” he lies.

“Canine form,” Fìrinn clarifies. Another slither of truth handed away by his daemon against his will.

Wymack’s gaze darkens with quiet anger. Atsila just looks tired. “Kevin’s daemon doesn’t bother you like this.”

“Kevin is my age. As is Riko.” Neil makes to stand, but Wymack waves him back down.

“You asked me a question. At least hold off until I answer, damn it.” Wymack glares until Neil is back in his place. “Pitbulls have a bad rep, okay? We might seem like loud, grouchy fucks-” Atsila levels a look at him, “-fine, _I_ might seem like a loud, grouchy fuck, but Atsila’s a softie. She won’t attack anyone who doesn’t attack her first.”

“I know that up here.” Neil presses a finger to his temple. “But…” He gestures to Fìrinn, still pressed against his side, nose twitching.

“Your parents must be something else.” Wymack says, then winces at whatever face Neil makes.

“He didn’t mean to assume,” Atsila apologises on her human’s behalf. Neil considers lying, but there’s no point. His reaction gave him away.

“My father’s daemon was a Pitbull too,” Wymack volunteers. He looks faintly queasy at the admission – neither of them are made for heart-to-hearts, and his discomfort is more reassuring than it should be. “Dogs run in the family. Trust me, kid. Daemon forms only mean something if you let them mean something. Parents, likewise. At the end of the day, whether or not you’re a sack of shit, that’s up to you.”

Neil nods, and at last, Wymack dismisses him.

Kevin is easy to find, which is unfortunate, because this is not a conversation Neil wants to have. They take a seat at centre-court, right on top of the fox logo, and Kevin and Caith listen with abject horror as Fìrinn tells their story. It is the most she has spoken to anyone other than Neil – or maybe Andrew, at a push – in all her life. But it has to come from her, all of it, otherwise Kevin won’t trust a word of Neil’s story.

Kevin’s horror soon turns to fury at Neil’s stupidity, and it’s difficult for Neil to defend himself. His anger, however, is undercut by Caith’s reaction. She is slow to move, but she ducks her head until it nudges the top of Fìrinn’s. Neil feels the intention in the bottom of his stomach, fear and grief wrapped up in bone-deep understanding. Caith might be the only daemon in the world who could understand Fìrinn’s desperate need to stay. They’re fighters, they’re cowards, they’re survivors, but first and foremost, they’re players. Kevin’s tirade cuts off at the sight of the contact, and he looks as stupefied as Neil feels. Kevin is another who is not built for gentle gestures, and until now his daemon has shown no inclination to the contrary. But Caith isn’t trying to be comforting; she knows as well as Neil does the futility of such gestures. It’s a show of understanding.

Sharp panic replaces desperation as Kevin explains Neil’s place in the Moriyama hierarchy.

For a moment, Neil is dizzy with visions of what could have been – growing up at the nest, training to be the best he could be. Fìrinn would have settled as a bird, maybe even a raven, but she would have been as warped and deformed a soul as Riko’s. No, better to be a runaway than a wreck.

“Riko wants his property? Too bad.” Neil gestures to Fìrinn. “Spoiled merchandise. Looks like it’s too late to squash me into place. I don’t fit their aesthetic anymore.”

“They made an exception for me,” Kevin says queasily. The way his breath hitches on the word _exception_ tells Neil exactly how generous the Ravens were when it came to Kevin’s so-called inadequacy. “They will take you too.”

“I’m not a Raven,” snaps Fìrinn. “Neither is Neil.”

“Then run,” says Kevin, low and frantic. “You may not have been built to fly, but you were built to run, rabbit.”

“No,” Neil says before Fìrinn can. He has had enough of arguing with her. The need to run can burn him up until he’s nothing but ash, but he plans to follow his daemon’s wishes until they kill him.

Fìrinn steps forward until she’s nose-to-nose with Caith once more. “I’m a hare, by the way.”

“No,” says Kevin, aghast. “You’re too small for a hare.”

“Watch it,” says Neil testily.

Fìrinn stays statue-still under Caith’s inspection. “You remember my name, don’t you?”

Caith bows her head. “I will not tell anyone. Your name is yours to keep.” Then, in a voice low and pained, and so quiet Neil barely hears it, she says, “You should be court.”

It cuts him to the bone. Neil forces his gaze to meet Kevin’s. “Will you still teach me?”

“Every night,” he says, as though there was no possibility of giving any other answer.

Fìrinn sways as though the admission is a physical blow to her. Everything they ever wanted, but never dared dream of, just beyond their reach. The painful knowledge that Neil’s name will be on a death certificate by the end of the year burns a hole through his chest, but the fire it lights within him only fans his determination.

Andrew has been lapping the stadium stairs while they’ve been speaking, running off the excess energy of his medication. Lexia spends the time pacing along the perimeter of the court’s glass walls, periodically flopping onto one side and lying with her back squished up against the glass whenever she grows tired. Her ears twitch each time her human passes, but mostly she has been watching Kevin and Neil’s conversation.

“Kevin, what does she want?” He gestures towards Lexia to explain his train of thought.

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever your deal is with Andrew, it involves Lexia too. She fights to protect you just as fiercely as her human, which means that whatever you offered him, it’s something Andrew wants so deeply that he can’t block her out of this like he does with everything else.”

Kevin makes a face. “It’s complicated.”

“Then explain.”

Kevin stares across the court at Andrew’s daemon for a few moments. She is still watching them through the glass, although if she realises their conversation has turned to her there’s no indication that she cares. “How would you describe Andrew’s soul?”

Neil watches as Lexia stretches, dragging her claws across the floorboards with no regard for the marks left behind. The words that come to him sound needlessly cruel, but Neil is not one to soften the truth. “Joyless. Distant. Unfeeling.”

Kevin nods. “Andrew’s councillor used the same terms to describe him before he was put on his meds. When he comes off them, everyone expects him to revert back to being… well, the same as Lexia. They’ll keep holding each other at a distance, never feeling anything.”

“But you promised Andrew something different?”

“I promised him purpose. Something to build his life around.” Kevin pulls his knee in against his chest, and Caith leans down to rest her chin on it. He ruffles her ears thoughtfully as he speaks. “Andrew may deny it, but he wants to feel again. So does Lexia. I know it.”

“But if neither of them will admit they want what you offered, then why did they agree to the deal?”

“Denying they want what they want doesn’t stop them from wanting it,” Kevin says as though it’s all the explanation needed.

“So you think Andrew will come off his meds and his newfound love of Exy will heal his connection with Lexia? She won’t even come on court while he’s playing.”

“Lexia doesn’t play with Andrew because he won’t allow her to. He will grow tired of fighting his own soul eventually.” Kevin’s eyes flick down to Fìrinn. “You did.”

“Andrew’s issues with his daemon are not the same as mine.”

“I didn’t promise I’d fix his issues.” Kevin looks back out across the court. Andrew has grown tired of running up and down stairs and is watching them from the bench. “I promised them a foundation to build on. I will deliver.”

Neil opens his mouth, ready to shoot Kevin’s plan down in flames. Fìrinn cuts off his objection with a simple “Good luck.”

Neil is surprised to see that she means it. Somewhere down the line, Fìrinn became just as invested as Kevin was in drawing Lexia towards something meaningful. There’s no harm in the impulse, probably, as long as Fìrinn doesn’t get too attached. There’s only so much time left to them, and only so much they can do where Andrew and his daemon are concerned.

It was easier when all Fìrinn cared about was Exy and running. Neil isn’t sure when the Foxes – Andrew, in particular – joined that list, and running left it. Neil knows better than anyone that his time is short, but if he can make their situation a little better before he leaves then he will.

Neil takes a breath, pulls his daemon into his arms, and follows Kevin from the Foxhole Court.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please look at [this meme beta-lactamase made](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/618761745511694336/beta-lactamase-you-beautiful-bastard-you-did-it) about Fìrinn and Lexia it's so so good.
> 
> Been thinkin' about Raven!Neil and how his daemon would have settled in that timeline. Someone remind me to write that.
> 
> Next time: a heart-to-heart with Renee.


	14. Damning Evidence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil meets a new daemon and Andrew shares a secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: references to violence, death, Andrew's past, childhood trauma/abuse
> 
> Longer chapters take longer to edit... why did nobody warn me...

With Andrew’s behaviour growing increasingly erratic in the wake of Higgin’s call and visit, making sense of the man grows higher and higher on Neil’s list of priorities. After wasting a night in Eden’s watching Andrew gleefully dance around Neil’s questions, Neil resorts at last to taking Andrew’s advice and approaching Renee for answers.

Renee accepts Neil’s request to talk without question and leads them into a café before Neil can change his mind. She sits them at the table farthest corner from the door, the last place Neil would have chosen. Perhaps she is expecting Neil to make a run for it.

“Andrew warned you that I wanted to talk. You still seem surprised to see me,” Neil says, more of a statement than a question.

Renee confirms it with a tilt of her head. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you’re not exactly eager to spend time with me.”

“That’s not…” Neil is interrupted by Fìrinn wriggling in his lap. She paws at Neil’s sweater as though she can’t find a comfortable position, and it’s clearly the woman sitting across from him at the source of her discomfort. Neil swallows back the automatic denial, knowing it will fall flat in the face of his daemon’s discomfort.

Renee waves his unaired objections away. “I think that’s why Andrew sent you to me in the first place. He and I have a lot in common, and sometimes it helps to have someone around who understands what you’ve been through. Maybe he’s hoping that you and I can help each other.”

Neil stirs his coffee in lieu of answering. Renee sighs, reading the scepticism in his expression. “I would like for you to be able to trust me, Neil.”

“I’m sorry, but… look, don’t take this personally. I’m just not the trusting type.”

The corner of Renee’s mouth twitches. “Neil, please don’t be offended when I say that this is news to nobody.” The strands of hair tucked behind Renee’s ear shift. She tilts her head to the side as though listening to something, her gaze dropping momentarily into something distant and carefully blank. After a long moment, she forces her eyes back to Neil. “Are you a superstitious person, Neil?”

“No,” Neil says, eyeing Renee’s cross pendant with growing concern.

She catches the line of his gaze and laughs. “Me neither. Don’t worry, this has nothing to do with religion. The truth is, I’m not a very trusting person either.” Neil’s eyebrows must have risen noticeably, but Renee takes his disbelief in good faith. “Just because I believe in the goodness in people doesn’t mean I have to believe that all people are good. I think you and I both know better than that.” There’s another tiny shift of movement in the strands of hair which fall behind Renee’s ear. Neil’s eyes widen at the movement even as Renee continues to speak. “I ask about superstition because… well, maybe it’s easiest if I just make the introduction. I want you to be able to feel comfortable around me, Neil, so consider this a gesture of goodwill.” Renee reaches up to her ear, and something small and dark drops into her grasp.

She holds her hand out to Neil, revealing a spider about the size of a penny curled up in her palm. Renee’s daemon has long, spindly legs, jet-black aside from small red patches on the body. “This is Ae-Ra. A black widow spider.”

Ae-Ra’s legs twitch as though caught between the impulse to hide or strike. Fìrinn stands, angling for a better view before Neil pulls her back. He isn’t sure what he expected from Renee’s daemon - certainly not a spider. Not that the form bothers him; Neil has never spent enough time worrying about other people’s daemons to believe that any one form is better or worse than any other. Renee watches Neil’s expression intently and seems to be reassured by his non-reaction.

“Why do you keep him hidden? There’s nothing wrong with spider daemons, is there?”

“No, there isn’t, although some people can be quite particular about them.” Renee’s smile grows pained. “My secrecy has nothing to do with Ae-Ra’s form. Ae-Ra prefers to avoid public appearances because she is _idem genus_.”

“Oh. _Oh_ ,” says Neil, a little too loudly. Renee’s comments about superstition suddenly make a lot more sense. Neil may be blind to prejudices and preferences where forms are concerned, but he knows of _idem genus_. Daemons who share their humans’ gender are exceedingly rare and occur without rhyme or reason, but that hasn’t stopped humans throughout history from speculating. Ancient texts call them indicators of tarnished or damaged souls, while folklore and fairy tales blame them for everything from psychic abilities to witchcraft to changelings. The world may have moved past such beliefs, but the associations linger. No, Neil is not superstitious, but there are many who do not share his attitude. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“It’s fine.” Renee lifts her hand to her shoulder and deposits Ae-Ra there. Neil thinks he catches a whisper of speech, but it’s nothing Renee wishes to share. “Sometimes it’s easier if people do assume. I won’t say that it’s my only reason for keeping Ae-Ra out of the way, but it’s certainly an advantage.”

“People judge you?”

Renee laughs. “People judge me whatever I do, Neil. Ae-Ra stays hidden because I am a bad person trying very hard to be a good person. Ae-Ra, is a reminder that there will always be parts of me that I cannot change or escape, no matter how far I have come. It’s difficult to focus on the future in the presence that reminder, so she prefers to stay out of the way. One day I will be in a place where my past no longer bothers me, but until then… I’m sure you understand.” She sends Fìrinn a significant look. “I can’t change everything about myself, but the change I _can_ make is easier without a constant reminder of who I used to be.”

“And who was that?” says Fìrinn loudly. Neil curses.

“Sorry, she’s-”

“Curious? Understandable.” While Ae-Ra winds her way back up Renee’s neck and into her hairline, Renee tells Neil of her childhood, her time in gangs and in prison, and the adoptive mother that pulled her from that life. “I have met my fair share of superstitious people in my time. They say that people who share their daemon’s gender are doomed to terrible misfortune. I don’t believe that for a second, although plenty of my foster families did.”

“I suppose they saw your life as damning evidence.”

“Perhaps. Do you?”

“There’s no such thing as luck. Good or bad.” Neil’s eyes catch on her necklace again. “At least, that’s what I think.”

Renee nods, a hint of her previous smile creeping back into her features. “Thank you for understanding, Neil, and for listening. I hope this will help you to understand me better, even if trust is still beyond your reach. Just know I’m here to help you if you need it.”

Neil nods vaguely as he tries to trace his way back to his reason for coming to Renee in the first place before her revelations threw him from his train of thought. “You and Andrew have a lot in common.”

“Yes…?” Now it’s Renee’s turn to be surprised by the turn in conversation. “You could say that.”

“Then why don’t the two of you work?” After a moment of confused silence, Neil elaborates. “Why aren’t you together?”

From behind Renee’s ear, comes the faintest hint of a snicker. Renee pushes a stray strand of hair back as though wishing to cover the sound, pressing her twitching lips into a carefully flat line. “Oh. Is this why- Okay. Neil. It’s because I’m a woman.”

“Oh,” says Neil too loudly, again. “ _Oh-”_

Suffice to say, their conversation takes many turns that Neil did not expect.

He spends the next few days mulling over his conversation with Renee, thrown from his thoughts only when Nicky comes to him with pleading eyes and the news that his parents have invited him home for Thanksgiving. The only catch? Andrew and Aaron have to come too. Nicky seems resigned to failure already, but Eleadora dances around Neil’s ankles pleadingly until he and Fìrinn agree to talk Andrew into attending.

Neil finds Andrew in the cousin’s living room, leaning out of the window with a cigarette between his fingers. After some perfunctory bickering, he agrees to hear Neil out, leading him into the bedroom and shutting the door behind them. A few seconds later there’s an angry scratch of claws against the other side of the door as it becomes evident that Andrew has left his daemon outside. He waves Neil on impatiently, but the noise has shaken Neil’s focus away.

“Can you let her in?”

Andrew raises an eyebrow but gives into the request. Lexia hisses lowly as she squeezes through the gap Andrew allows her before scampering up one of the bookshelves, knocking empty crisp packets and cola cans to the floor in her wake. She tucks her legs under her body as she curls up on her perch, glaring down at Fìrinn, who is watching her progress from one of the lower bunks.

“Bread loaf,” says Neil absently.

“What?”

“When cats sit like that. It’s called bread loafing. Same shape.”

Andrew’s head lolls like it isn’t attached to his shoulder properly. “Did you just come in here to make inane comments, or did you have a point?”

“Lexia isn’t fluffy enough to be a bread loaf,” Fìrinn pipes up. “Dough ball.”

Andrew snorts, then scrunches up his face in irritation like he’s trying to take back the sound. “Tick tock, Neil. Your taunting won’t keep me entertained for long.”

“Why won’t you spend Thanksgiving with the Hemmicks?”

Andrew studies him for a long moment, his awful, lopsided grin sliding around his face. “How about another little exchange? Truth for truth, tit for tat.”

Neil clenches his fists, bracing for Fìrinn’s usual bout of panic, but it never comes. He looks across to see her watching from the bed, copying Lexia’s bread-loaf pose.

“What do you want to know?” Neil asks as soon as he finds his voice.

“Tell me about your settling,” Andrew says, directing his question to Fìrinn. “And I’ll tell you why Luther and I aren’t so cosy these days.”

Fìrinn’s ears twitch upwards. After a moment, she begins to describe the violent altercation with Nathan’s men that lead to her settling, minus any details that would expose the half-truths they had given Andrew for what they were. Andrew’s expression doesn’t change as she describes the man his mother shot so that Neil could survive.

“You’ve seen a lot of people die,” Andrew says. It isn’t quite a question, but Neil answers anyway.

“My first memories are of people dying.”

“That’s why you’re so interesting. How aggravating.” He raises a hand to halt whatever quip Fìrinn is preparing in response. “Would you like to cash in your prize for honesty before or after you meet Nicky’s folks? I would hate to colour your first impression of them.”

“Before,” says Neil. His life is far too unstable to hold off for a future that might not come.

“Luther was given a secret. A very important secret, one that would ensure that he did not send me back to the Spears.” Andrew looks to Fìrinn. “I’m sure you understand the weight of truth when it comes from your daemon. It leaves no room for denial or rejection.”

It takes a moment for Neil to join the significance of the statements together. “Lexia told Luther your secret?”

“I made her. I thought that Luther would be forced to believe me if it came from Lexia. Everyone knows daemons are terrible liars.”

“Did he believe her?”

Andrew’s sick smile is answer enough. “I wish I could say I was surprised.”

“But you weren’t,” Neil finishes the sentence for him. “Was Lexia?”

Andrew waves the question away like it’s unimportant, but when Neil’s gaze doesn’t shift, he answers it all the same. “I was used to being ignored. Lexia? Not so much.”

“Is that why Lexia doesn’t talk?” says Fìrinn suddenly. “Because she thinks she won’t be listened to?”

Andrew’s smile grows sharp like a cat raising its hackles. He waggles a scolding finger at Fìrinn. “You’re getting distracted.” There’s a dark, defensive tone to his words, one that Neil recognises from the day Higgins first called. He remembers his conversation with Andrew in the locker room, and the strange reaction he had to a certain word.

“He said it was a misunderstanding,” Neil murmurs.

Andrew goes perfectly still, if only for a second, but it’s his daemon’s reaction which truly gives him away. Lexia darts from the shelf to the bunk on level with Neil’s head, leaning over the edge so that she can hiss in his face. Neil steps back, hands raised, and she stalks from view, diving under the bedcovers. Andrew watches her with his usual addled grin, but the tense set of his shoulders gives his irritation away. “I warned you once not to use that word.”

“What does this have to do with my settling?” Neil follows the Lexia-shaped lump beneath the covers as he speaks.

Andrew starts, clearly not expecting the question. “For the sake of a fair exchange. If you believe in that sort of thing.”

“That’s why Lexia settled,” Neil says. “Because Luther didn’t believe her.”

Andrew scoffs. “Lexia settled long, long before Luther. But yes, for similar reasons. I shared my secret, they didn’t believe me, they dropped the M-word, voila! Goodbye trust, naivety, childhood, you get the picture.” Andrew waves to the golden eyes glinting from beneath the sheets. “Rabid, hairless goblin forever. What a delight.”

Neil remains blank-faced in the face of Andrew’s sarcasm. “She isn’t so bad.”

Again, Andrew goes still, just for a second, expression unreadable. “Aggravating,” he repeats, the word punching from his chest like he was holding it in with his breath. Neil hears the warning in Andrew’s voice and changes track before Andrew banishes him from sight entirely. “If Luther is that bad, maybe this will be the last straw for Nicky. He might walk away for good this time.”

Andrew reaches out to hook his fingers in Neil’s collar. Neil’s back hits the bedpost, and a second later he notices Lexia’s presence by his head once again. Andrew flicks his daemon an irritated look before speaking. “We are all going to regret this.” He relinquishes his grip before Neil has the chance to process his agreement. “We’re done talking. Goodbye.” He wafts his hand at Neil’s head, although whether it’s Lexia or Neil he’s waving away, it’s impossible to say.

Neil leaves to deliver Nicky the verdict. Fìrinn, once again, is slow to follow, lingering at Lexia’s side a moment before she follows.

“I believe her,” Fìrinn says as they pass through the deserted corridor.

“She didn’t say anything to you.”

“She doesn’t have to.”

Neil shakes his head. It’s a worry for another day; for now, he can content himself with breaking the good news to Nicky.

For better or worse, they’re going to visit the Hemmicks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Renee's black widow: Ae-Ra. 愛 "love" and 羅 "net for catching birds". Sino-Korean.
> 
> Idem genus: Latin, "same gender".
> 
> [Guess who dusted off their old Twitter account.](https://twitter.com/darkblueboxs) I truly have no idea how this site operates now, which should be entertaining in the very least.


	15. Breaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dinner with the Hemmicks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ***IMPORTANT***  
> This chapter contains adult material which some may find triggering. Please do not take any risks with your mental health.
> 
> *Content warnings*  
> Please note the Archive Warnings this fic is tagged with. This chapter deals with the events of the meal at the Hemmicks as they occurred in canon, including depictions of violence, rape, and self-harm.
> 
> I've done all that I can to tag/ warn for this chapter as appropriately as possible, but if anyone has suggestions for edits/additions please let me know.

Maria greets the monsters at the door to the Hemmick residence, her chinchilla daemon zipping nervously between her ankles as she attempts to welcome the cousins into her home. While the monsters and the Hemmicks make their introductions there’s a flurry of scrabbling and hissing as their demons release the pent-up anxiety and anger that their humans are too restrained to express. Luther’s mantis stays perched upon his shoulder, looking down upon the mess of brawling daemons with disdain.

Eventually they take their places at the table out on the garden decking. Lexia stalks off into the long grass at the first opportunity, leaving the humans to their empty pleasantries. Neil nudges Fìrinn towards the table before she can follow, worried that two vanishing daemons will test the limits of the Hemmick’s patience. It isn’t unusual for Lexia to avoid humans whenever possible, but the way she sticks to whichever side of the room Luther isn’t on as though he’s carrying the plague is excessive even for her. The narrowing of Luther’s eyes as she skirts from view says that he has noticed too. Neil wonders if Luther truly understands the effect his dismissal of Andrew’s secret had on her.

Fìrinn, meanwhile, circles Neil’s ankles nervously before jumping into his lap, rattling the table mid-way through prayers. Nobody looks up, although Luther’s jaw clenches at the sound. Andrew, who doesn’t bother pretending to pray, smirks at her. Neil fervently wishes that he could have followed Lexia into the garden’s undergrowth rather than hang around witnessing the awkward conversation that follows.

At the end of the meal, Luther follows Andrew into the kitchen, where strident tones can soon be heard. Neil can’t hear any signs of violence, but he notices when Lexia slides from the bushy undergrowth and through the screen doors after them. Eleadora, who has spent most of the meal staring at Nicky’s parents with a mix of longing and panic, twitches in Nicky’s lap at the sight.

Luther returns to the table alone. His mantis has moved from his shoulder to slide beneath the fold of his collar. Neil wonders what Andrew said to him.

“Make sure they’re not breaking anything!” Eleadora hisses to Fìrinn beneath the table, far too loudly. Maria shakes her head disapprovingly.

“Don’t be rude, Nicholas. Above-table talk only.”

“We’ll check on Andrew,” says Neil, rising from the table.

“There is no need to worry,” Maria says before Neil can head back into the kitchen. “He’ll be back when he has finished speaking with Drake.”

The sensation that tears through Neil in that moment is akin to a bullet. Neil is a few steps behind Fìrinn in joining the dots together and can only gasp as her panic rips him open without any real understanding as to why. As conversations about Cass and Higgins and Luther and Richard clutter and crowd Neil’s mind, Fìrinn takes off, rattling the table again as she knocks a leg on her way past. Neil, who hasn’t caught up yet mentally or physically, nearly blacks out as she hits the limit of their distance. He collapses to his knees but raw panic pulls him back to his feet immediately. Fìrinn’s urgency is infectious, and Neil grabs Aaron with one hand and his new racquet with the other as he passes, barely conscious of doing so. Something wriggles angrily under Aaron’s sleeve as Neil pulls him along, but Aaron’s furious protests are silenced by Fìrinn’s urgent hiss.

She skitters to a stop at the only closed door on the second floor. Every inch of her is shaking, although it isn’t from fear. It’s a strange mix of panic and fury that drives Neil to hand Aaron the racquet before slamming into the door with all the force he can muster.

For a few seconds, every sound is a distant roar. Neil isn’t sure if it’s Drake’s startled shout that he hears or the sound of Neil’s world crashing down around him. Blood streaks down Drake’s face and arms which are mottled in stark, criss-crossing claw-marks. Swinging from one hand as he jumps to his feet, is-

Is-

Drake’s fist is closed so tightly around Lexia’s neck that it’s a miracle that is hasn’t snapped. Her skin is wrecked with fingernail scratches and flecks of blood, whether Andrew’s or Drake’s it’s impossible to say. She writhes in Drake’s grip, unable to gain purchase on anything as he hoists her in the air like a hunting trophy. Her human is pinned to the mattress by Drake’s weight, limp and bloodied and covered in marks from human and daemon attack alike.

Neil never sees Drake’s daemon. Later, he will be immensely grateful for the small blessing. He’s too busy regaining his balance from kicking the door down to see what creature boots Fìrinn clear across the room, and he’s knocked to his knees all over again as the impact shakes from her through to him.

He hears the whistle of a swinging racquet, and suddenly his vision is filled with whirling strands of dust as the unknown daemon falls apart before him. He looks up to see his racquet embedded in Drake’s skull. Drake sways on his feet a moment, looking at the spot where his daemon once was as though waiting for it to reappear, before falling to the ground with a meaty thud. There’s a sudden clatter as Neil’s racquet slips through Aaron’s fingers to join its victim on the floor.

Neil doesn’t look up at the sound, nor does he look at Aaron or Drake or Fìrinn, even though her injuries are screaming through his body as though they’re his own. He can’t make himself look at anyone but Andrew.

There’s a thud of footsteps on the stairwell, Caith’s panicked yapping echoing down the corridor. Neil is interrupted from pulling the bloodied sheets around Andrew’s shivering frame by Fìrinn’s voice.

“Help. Neil, help her, you have to…ple-” she catches herself mid-way through the word, although Andrew’s hysterical laughter sways in pitch regardless. “Neil, help, help, I can’t-”

Neil rolls himself over Andrew without touching him to the other side of the bed, the side where Drake’s body is cooling on the floor. Thick, heavy nausea rolls through him as he sees the source of Fìrinn’s distress. He nods mutely to her, not trusting himself to open his mouth.

Lexia’s claws scrape and scrabble uselessly against the floor, sending ripples through the spreading pool of blood. She’s pinned under the weight of Drake’s corpse. Fìrinn’s paws and muzzle are soaked in blood, but her efforts to free Lexia have been in vain. They’re both too small.

Neil chokes back the rising bile. “Andrew. I need to – I can’t – I have to touch her, Andrew.”

The sound of Andrew’s laughter tilts the entire world beneath Neil’s feet. Lexia lets out a low hiss – not angry, but panicked – followed by a mewl so quiet Neil wonders if he heard it.

“I can’t do this if you don’t say yes, Andrew.”

“Leave her be. She’s having a great time, isn’t she? Aren’t we all? So glad we came.” Andrew’s words are slurred with what sounds like concussion.

“Let her out!” Fìrinn says, high-pitched and frantic.

“Do what you like.” Andrew is trying in vain to push himself upright, laughing faintly at the pain the attempt causes him. “Yes, yes. We can’t leave her lying around here all day, can we?”

They’re interrupted momentarily by Kevin’s arrival. There’s a thud as he backs into the doorway and trips over Caith, before both disappear again. Knowing that help will be there soon does little to settle Neil’s nerves. The last thing he wants is to go near Lexia in the state she and Andrew are in, but he isn’t cruel enough to leave the task to someone Andrew hates even more than Neil. Heaving the body out of the way isn’t the troubling part – Neil has dealt with enough corpses in his time. It’s the accidental brush of his fingers against Lexia’s broken, bloodied body that scorches through him like agonising wildfire, reaching right into his chest and pulling his heart out whole. Lexia was struggling before, but now that the pressure has been lifted, she’s terrifyingly still, barely tracking Neil’s movement through her glassy, golden eyes.

Fìrinn won’t come any closer than she is but urges Neil on. Desperate to make the moment of contact as painless as possible, Neil swaddles Lexia in a sheet before lifting her into his arms, another protective layer to keep him from touching her unnecessarily. He can still feel her heartbeat against his chest, elevated despite the limp looseness of her body.

Andrew has succeeded in pushing himself upright, and his smile is bright and mocking as he sees Neil with Lexia in his arms. Neil steps forward to place her in his lap, and Andrew jerks back so violently that he smacks into the headboard behind him.

“Oh, no. No, no, no you don’t,” Andrew says. The laughter leaking through the edges of his words does nothing to detract from the brutal fury. “Keep her the fuck away from me.”

“Andrew…” Neil dithers, uncomfortable holding her any longer than he has to but unwilling to return her to the blood-stained floorboards. “She’s hurt.”

“Keep her away from me, I don’t want to feel it.”

Lexia makes a noise. It isn’t identifiable enough to attach any description to.

“I need to put her down.”

There’s movement downstairs. Kevin has evidently sounded the alarm.

“Better with me than with them,” Andrew says lightly, before tilting his arm to make space in the crook of his elbow. “Oh, that’s unpleasant,” he adds as Neil places the bundle of blankets containing Lexia along his side. “I’m not a fan of this at all. Looks like a fresh cut from the butcher’s shop, doesn’t she?” Andrew lets Neil tighten the blankets around his shoulders with a bemused expression. “I think one of us is concussed.”

It’s then that Aaron seems to return to his body. He makes a sound that might be Andrew’s name. Andrew, who has barely acknowledged his brother’s existence in the entire time Neil has known them, looks immediately to his brother. The sound seems to spark something in Lexia, who begins to shift at last, wriggling in Aaron’s direction, gaze focusing once again.

As though hearing Lexia’s silent demand, Aaron climbs onto the bed, taking hold of Andrew as though he expects his brother to disappear if he lets go. “Andrew, I didn’t- he-”

Andrew knots his fingers in Aaron’s hair and yanks. “Ledie. Where is she?”

Aaron slides a panicked look Neil’s way before abandoning his caution and lifting the hem of his sleeve. A black mouse wriggles into the palm of Aaron’s hand. Andrew hooks his fingers around Aaron’s wrist and pulls his hand up to eye-level so he can speak to Aaron’s daemon directly. “Did he touch you?”

“No.” Ledie is shaking all over. “Lexia-”

“Quiet, quiet. Did he touch Aaron?”

“No.”

“The blood?”

“Drake’s.”

“I’ll kill him.” Andrew’s gaze goes out of focus for a moment before zeroing back in on his brother’s daemon. “That’s all. Shoo, shoo, back to safety for you.”

Ledie stays in place like she’s been glued to Aaron’s palm in spite of Andrew’s order. Before Andrew can object, Kevin returns with Nicky at his shoulder. Nicky rushes to Andrew’s side, stopping only when he sees Lexia bundled up in the crook of his arm. His expression crumples at the sight of the drying blood and blackening marks marring her bony frame. He sinks to his knees, and is hugging Eleadora to his chest when Luther arrives in the doorway. His daemon darts out of sight beneath the neck of his shirt as Luther takes in the scene before him.

“Oh, Luther. So glad you made it.” Andrew shifts, and Neil catches his shoulder to keep him from falling. “I think you owe someone an apology, no?” In all the time Neil has known him, he has never seen Andrew touch his daemon before now. Andrew tugs the sheets from Lexia and scoops her up, holding her aloft for Luther’s inspection. “Or do you still think this is all a misunderstanding?” Lexia’s claws unsheathe at the word, but Andrew doesn’t react as they dig into his hand. “Tell her. Tell her again that this is normal brotherly affection.”

The sound Eleadora makes is muffled by Nicky’s chest. Aaron flinches so heavily that Ledie nearly falls from his hand. She says something which Neil doesn’t catch until her human repeats it.

“This has happened before.” The room goes still for an achingly long moment. Then, to the surprise of her human, Ledie leaps from Aaron’s hand, charging across the bedsheets towards Luther.

“Get out! _GET OUT!”_ She launches herself from the end of the bed, as Luther scrambles from view. Andrew laughs, although whether it’s the image of Luther being chased off by a tiny black mouse or a combination of trauma and concussion that has set him off again, Neil doesn’t know. He can hear sirens in the distance.

“Go catch Angelina Ballerina before she gets stepped on.” Andrew lets go of Aaron’s hair and shoves him away, lowering Lexia back onto the bed with his other hand. He peels off his armbands next, dropping them into Neil’s lap. The bare stretch of Andrew’s forearms are mottled with scars. Some are claw marks.

“Andrew,” says Fìrinn. It’s the first thing she has said in some time; it feels like it’s the only thing she’s still capable of saying.

“Take a page from her book,” Andrew says, nodding to Lexia. Lexia’s only movement is the uneven rise and fall of her chest as she lies sprawled and exposed in the mess of blood-stained sheets. “Let’s no one talk for a while.”

Fìrinn climbs into Neil’s arms, and they wait for the ambulance to arrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Help & advice for anyone affected.](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sexual-health/help-after-rape-and-sexual-assault/)


	16. Fìrinn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew departs for Easthaven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick note to say that I messed up a line in chapter 14: I accidentally wrote dialogue in which Neil refers to Fìrinn by name in front of Andrew. If you were sharp-eyed enough to notice it, please pretend you didn't - as of the end of ch15, Andrew does not know Fìrinn's name. Don't edit your writing at 2am, kids. 😭
> 
> Content warnings: mentions of drugs and self-harm.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Fìrinn says, startling Neil from his thoughts. “Sending Andrew to Easthaven. I think he should go.”

Neil stares at her as though she has grown another head. “Why?”

“Why? You saw him. You saw Lexia. You saw the wedge the drugs have driven between them. He’s so high it’s like her pain is just funny to him.”

“I know why he needs to come off the drugs. I don’t know why you want him to. The team could be disqualified right before spring championships-”

Fìrinn drums her foot agitatedly. “I don’t _care_ about the championships. Andrew is more important.”

The admission is enough to stun Neil into silence. “When did you start caring about Andrew more than Exy?”

She snaps at him instead of answering, and Neil decides to let the matter lie. Since coming back to the cousin’s house in Columbia, Lexia has not left Andrew’s bedroom, her human perfectly content to roam the house untethered. Andrew would often wander from one room to the next without checking whether his daemon was following, but this is a new layer of detachment that even those used to his mannerisms find unsettling. It’s clear that Fìrinn is deeply disturbed by Lexia’s absence, although Neil isn’t sure if it’s due to the unnatural distance Andrew can put between himself and his daemon or because she’s genuinely concerned for Lexia’s wellbeing. Either way, she knows better than to pester Andrew about his daemon’s whereabouts. She would only be answered with a mocking grin from bitten and bruised lips.

“I think it’s a side-effect of the drugs,” Nicky whispers to Neil in a quiet moment. His eyes are ringed red, and he looks like he went three rounds in his sleep. “You know that feeling in your chest when your daemon is too far away? Like your heart is being pulled right out of your ribcage? I think the drugs numb it out. I think he could leave Lexia in a dumpster and walk away if he really wanted to. God, Neil, they have to take him off those drugs. They _have to_.”

Neil doesn’t know what to say, but Fìrinn’s actions speak for him. She nudges Eleadora with the tip of her nose, and Eleadora gives a twitch that could be surprise or gratitude. Fìrinn has barely acknowledged her existence since Neil’s first night in Columbia.

The obvious hurdle that hasn’t yet occurred to Nicky, and that Neil is too kind to point out, is that regardless of other’s opinions, Andrew won’t agree to be taken off the drugs if it means being separated from Kevin.

Neil’s assumption is put to the test when Andrew comes crashing down the stairs to interrupt Neil and Kevin’s breakfast. He is, as is the case these days, without his daemon. He pats Kevin down for imaginary injuries and stoops exaggeratedly to check Caith, hands clasped behind his back as he looks her over.

“Both present and accounted for. For how much longer, I wonder?”

“We’ll take care of it.” Atsila appears in the doorway, her human a few paces behind her. Neil can tell Wymack isn’t as enthused as his daemon is over the idea of sending Andrew away; it may be his job to worry about the team’s standings, but it isn’t Atsila’s.

Andrew’s amusement is thick with mockery. “Oh, come on, coach. You’ll have to do better than that.”

“We will watch Kevin,” says Fìrinn. Every eye in the room turns upon her, Neil’s included. She ignores his surprise.

It’s enough to startle the smile from Andrew’s face, if only for a moment. “You?”

Andrew lurches forwards. It’s a fakeout, but Fìrinn doesn’t recognise it as such, drumming her foot threateningly against the countertop but gives no ground. Andrew looks from her to Neil with bemusement. Mere months ago, the same movement would have sent her running.

“We’ve been practicing standing our ground,” Neil says in German. “Trust us.”

“Trust you.” Andrew enunciates the words as though he has never heard them before. “You lie, and lie, and lie, and you think I’ll trust you with his life?”

“You don’t have to trust Neil,” says Fìrinn. “Just me.”

Andrew laughs mirthlessly. He places his hands flat on the counter and stoops to eye-level with Fìrinn. “Oh, but you? You’re so much worse, Thumper. You don’t lie outright, but you dance around us with your little half-truths. You may feed me enough crumbs to keep me from digging, but we both know the best lies are those of omission. Neil is a threat, but you’re an outright danger. The only problem lies in determining whether you’re more of a danger to me or to your human.”

“Thumper,” she repeats.

“Got another name?”

“If I gave you it, would you go?” Her offer has Neil’s breath catching in his throat. He has not given anyone Fìrinn’s true name in years, and Fìrinn has never offered it to anyone. “Would my name be enough to earn your trust?”

“A name in exchange for my trust. That’s a raw deal for me, is it not?”

“You don’t know what my name is worth.”

Andrew studies her, his fingers drumming against the countertop as he thinks. “Fine.” He straightens, hooking a finger in Neil’s collar to tug him in. “But I want to hear it from you.”

Neil catches Andrew’s wrist loosely in his fingers. A few white lines peak past the hem of his armbands, not recognisable unless the observer knew what they were looking for. Andrew won’t be allowed to keep his bands in Easthaven; Neil worries what the doctors will make of them. “Why me?”

“Your daemon is good at talking the talk. I need you to prove that you can deliver on her promises.”

Neil presses his lips together. Their conversation may be in German, but he’s still far too aware of their audience. Names are names, regardless of language, so to answer he leans in until his mouth is by Andrew’s ear. “Fìrinn.” Her name shakes from him as though it has rattled something loose in his chest. He straightens quickly, trying not to inhale the smell of Andrew’s deodorant nor the underlying tang of dried blood and disinfectant. Andrew’s eyes burn into Neil’s, his fingers still curled tightly in the collar of Neil’s shirt. Neil is still close enough to see the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

In case he still hasn’t made his point, Neil takes Andrew’s hand and drags it under the hem of his shirt to the scarred skin beneath. “I can deliver,” he says, forcing himself to hold Andrew’s gaze. “No matter what they do to me.”

Andrew’s fingers twitch against Neil’s abdomen. His eyes slide across Neil’s shirt as though he can see through it to the scars beneath before flicking to Fìrinn. The story she gave him at the beginning of term doesn’t explain the wasteland of Neil’s torso.

“The best lies are those of omission,” she explains.

Andrew pulls free and folds his arms over his chest. Finally, he laughs, spinning on the balls of his feet to address Kevin. “It’ll have to do, won’t it?”

Caith whines, effectively summing up Kevin’s reaction.

“Well, no time to waste!” Andrew charges out of the kitchen. “Let’s get moving!” He snaps his fingers to summon Betsy as he stalks towards the front door, then grinds to a halt, smacking his forehead dramatically. He U-turns and heads back upstairs, and when he returns Lexia is tucked into the hood of his jacket, the tips of her ears peaking over the hem. It’s impossible to tell from his manic leer whether Andrew genuinely forgot his daemon or if it was his idea of a joke; either way, he is the only one laughing. Neil doesn’t know what Andrew will be like off the medication, but he’s sure he won’t miss that awful, hollow laugh.

The house is strangely quiet once Andrew slams the door behind him. Wymack steps towards Neil, gesturing vaguely between him and the space Andrew vacated. “When did that happen?”

“When did what?”

Wymack looks ready to say something else, but Atsila hushes him before he can.

Soon the remaining monsters are assembled, and together they return to Palmetto, their number one fewer than when they came.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Another quality meme from the legendary vertigo](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/620738458031439872/did-i-do-it-right-blue-yes-you-did) to tide you through these trying times.
> 
> I also came across [this fantastic art of Andrew with a sphynx cat](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/622088859299266560) which is completely unrelated to this fic but insanely cool so pls look at it anyways.


	17. Into the Nest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil arrives at Edgar Allan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, sorry for the delay! Juggling three multi-chap fics = not the smartest move 
> 
> Content warnings: graphic violence, psychological & emotional abuse.

Fìrinn hasn’t been able to stay still since the winter banquet, since Riko’s daemon pinned her to the floor in a room full of people while Riko hissed threats into Neil’s ear, threats about what would be done to Andrew if Neil didn’t come to the Nest over winter break. Neil was more than used to Fìrinn scuffling with other daemons, but the surge of fury that prompted him to put his fist through Riko’s face surprised them both.

Days later, it’s Fìrinn’s determination which pulls Neil through the arrivals gate to where Jean is waiting for him. The Raven barely acknowledges Neil’s arrival before he turns on his heel and heads for the car park. His daemon flitters nervously around Neil’s head before following him.

The staircase that leads them down into the belly of the nest seems to be deliberately built with steps just a little higher than the standard; it is difficult enough for Fìrinn to clatter her way down them, and for a smaller daemon it would be impossible. Of course the Ravens wouldn’t see the value in accommodating for any daemon that couldn’t fly.

“Cult,” Neil mutters. Jean snipes at Fìrinn’s slow progress while his daemon pecks at her heels. Tired of watching her struggle, Neil gives up on the show of confidence and pulls her into his arms for the rest of their descent.

The living quarters are so black it feels as though Neil has stepped into a negative space. Fìrinn’s light fur makes her the only bright point in the void, and Neil shivers with discomfort at how she stands out. _Visible_ means _target_ , his mother always told him. She wasn’t wrong; Neil knows there is nowhere to hide in the nest, but this feels more than anything like a target on his back.

The first thing Neil notices about the common rooms are the perches mounted to the walls, custom-built horizontal black rails reminding Neil of jail cell bars. Jean’s daemon lands on one, shuffling from foot to foot as Jean gives Neil a tour. While Jean is a block of apparent calm, his daemon is twitchy, always fluttering slightly out of arm’s reach. Neil recognises the instinct.

Fìrinn has been compliant – if snappish – up until she sees where they are expected to sleep. She thrashes until Neil is forced to drop her and is blocked from storming out only by Jean’s presence in the doorway.

Kevin’s possessions are untouched, postcards still fixed to the walls, dusty history books lining his shelves. There’s a pile of blankets at the bottom of the bed where Neil can imagine Caith curling up. It’s hard to imagine Kevin or his daemon fitting in these disproportionate rooms with their cramped quarters and low ceilings. Neil thinks about how it must have felt to spend every day surrounded by the Ravens and their aviary daemons, working around the awkward rigidity of the Nest, as physical as it was mental. Living every moment in a space not built for him. Neil wonders if Kevin would have chosen to change his daemon form if he had been given the opportunity. The answer leaves a black, bitter taste on his tongue.

Jean leads Neil to the court where a vicious skirmish is taking place. Daemons caw and swoop, sniping at each other overhead while players clash below. Fìrinn presses close to Neil’s ankles as they watch. At the end of the match, the players line up to critique each other’s performance. The daemons similarly fall into line, displaying the same eerie synchronicity that they did at the banquet.

“Cult,” Fìrinn whispers, earning another peck from Jean’s daemon. As soon as Riko leaves the court, however, the songbird flitters up to perch on Jean’s head, apparently doing her best to bury herself in his hair. Rikka isn’t fooled, swooping over Jean’s head close enough that neither he nor his daemon can hold back a flinch. Neil meets Riko’s gaze with a smile that feels like ice.

Riko looks Neil over with ghoulish satisfaction before dismissing him to the locker rooms, where Jean hands Neil a Raven kit with JOSTEN printed across the back.

Neil tries to thrust the kit back into Jean’s arms. “Someone here is delusional. Is it you or him?”

“It is you. Try not to get us both killed on your first day, you ignorant child. Your inadequacies are intolerable enough without your insubordination.”

“Oh, my inadequacies? You mean having a mind of my own?” Neil nods to Fìrinn.

Jean wrinkles his nose like the sight of Fìrinn is offensive to him. “If you had come to the Ravens when the master intended-”

“What? You think I would be just like you, that I would have a…” Neil gestures at Jean’s daemon. Birds aren’t his strong suit. “Sparrow?”

Jean splutters. “ _Ortolan.”_

“Whatever. That isn’t how it works. You can’t change someone’s soul.”

“Perhaps not in your world, but the master has his ways.” Jean’s tone indicates that Neil would not be wise to ask for specifics. “Kevin escaped the master’s methods only because his daemon had already settled when he came to us. We are unfortunate that he could not help but follow in his father’s footsteps concerning his daemon’s form.”

“His – his what?”

“His _father_ , you hard-of-hearing imbecile.” Jean labours over each syllable as though he’s talking to a toddler. “Your coach.”

Neil makes a strangled wheeze as the force of the words hit him. “You’re lying.”

Jean’s daemon speaks for the first time since Neil’s arrival. “Why else would Kevin run to such a dreadful team?”

Neil’s gaze snaps upwards. The daemon’s confirmation erases all possibility of denial.

Jean quickly grows tired of Neil’s stunned silence. “While you are here, you are my responsibility and I am yours. If Fìrinn’s inadequacies prove insurmountable on the court, I will be the one who pays for them.”

Fìrinn recoils from the sound of her name; Neil’s flinch is full-body. “I never gave you her name.”

Jean scoffs. “There is no such thing as privacy in the nest. You gave up the right to secrecy the moment you insulted Riko on Kathy’s stage.” When it becomes clear that his words have done nothing but worsen Neil’s panic, he changes tack. “ _He_ is Myrl.” He gestures to his daemon, who is shuffling from foot to foot on the roof of the lockers. “Now we are even.”

“I doubt it,” Neil says flatly. The revelation that Jean and his daemon are _idem genus_ , like Renee and Ae-Ra, doesn’t surprise Neil as much as it should. There was a strange moment of understanding that passed between Jean and Renee when they met at the winter banquet, one that Neil couldn’t quite decipher until now.

He shoves the Raven strip into Jean’s arms once again just as the locker room door opens. Neil has his back to it, but he doesn’t miss the way Myrl all but dives back to the relative safety of Jean’s hair. When Neil looks back he finds Riko and Tetsuji standing in the doorway. If he thought Rikka looked intimidating, she is a pale imitation of Tetsuji’s sleek, proud raven daemon. Side-by-side, Rikka almost looks scraggly and small in comparison. Her feathers are still ruffled from practice, and Neil’s presence seems to have shot a certain mania through her, leaving her unable to stand still as Tetsuji and his daemon approach Neil. The top of Tetsuji’s cane is decorated with a small, golden emblem, a shining carving of his daemon, for which the Ravens were named.

He lowers the cane to point it towards Fìrinn, who is standing statue-still between Neil’s feet. “Show her to me.”

Neil steps forward, placing Fìrinn behind him. “No.”

He thinks he hears Myrl say his name, but the sound is lost to the panicked hitch of Jean’s breath.

“You will show me your sorry excuse for a daemon,” Tetsuji commands, “and I shall decide whether you have any remaining worth despite your poor choice of form.”

Neil smiles. It may turn out to be his last. “Why? Is being worthless a prerequisite for your team?”

He takes a brief moment of satisfaction from the way Rikka and Riko visibly edge back from Tetsuji. Tetsuji’s daemon does not move, not even to blink. The moment of thick, deadly tension is shattered by the crack of Tetsuji’s cane as it catches Neil across his face. Neil stumbles from the force of the blow, falling back against the lockers. He brings his arms up automatically to protect himself, but he is not the target of Tetsuji’s next strike.

Neil’s vision turns black as he feels the strike slam through Fìrinn’s body. His world is spinning like he is no longer attached to it, and it’s all he can do to slide to the floor. He reaches for Fìrinn as blows rain down on them both in turn, desperate to pull her in against him, to curl up into a protective ball and wait for the pain to end. He can’t force himself to look up from the feet that step between them, can’t tell if it’s Jean or Riko who has stepped in to block Neil from his daemon. Either way, the result is the same.

Neil passes out with his daemon’s name on his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jean's ortolan: Myrl. From Merle, meaning blackbird, of the sea. French.
> 
> ((I think there was another name that influenced Myrl but I lost the gosh darn diddly reference je suis désolée tlm))
> 
> Neil "is this a pigeon" Josten strikes again...
> 
> Edit: Forgot to mention [this adorable submission from lvly-hnn](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/623201983540690944/saw-this-amazing-artwork-on-ig-by-katylipscomb) of art that had Matt/Dan daemon vibes <3


	18. Ready to Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil celebrates the new year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy end of book two! I'm hoping it won't take me too long to be ready to start posting book three, but my schedule is unpredictable at best so if I go quiet for a bit don't panic! I'll get there sooner or later :)
> 
> Content warnings: injuries, panic attack, attempted self-harm, references to abuse & drugs

Fìrinn wakes a beat before Neil, roused by Atsila’s panicked nuzzling. For a moment, neither of them remember where they are, convinced that Riko’s hands are about to seize them once again. Neither of them has the energy for even the pretence of a fight: Fìrinn flails half-heartedly before sinking back into Neil’s arms, while Neil can only blink vacantly at Wymack’s silhouette. Cars rumble past while the concrete pavement bites into his legs and planes roar overhead.

“Up,” says Wymack. “We’re getting out of here.”

Neil manages, with Wymack’s help, but the same cannot be said for Fìrinn. Neil almost falls over as he stoops to collect her, but Atsila beats him to it. She picks Fìrinn up by the scruff of the neck, and Fìrinn slumps into the hold. Under normal circumstances, Neil would be mortified. As it is, he can only sag with relief as Atsila climbs into the car after him to carefully deposit Fìrinn back on his lap.

Sleep does not pull her in as quickly as it does him. She watches Neil as he tumbles into unconsciousness once more, at last having mastered the talent his mother had long dreamed of teaching them.

The next thing Neil remembers is waking up on Wymack’s couch. His arm jerks out for his daemon instinctively, where is she, who has her-?!

Fìrinn blinks at him from the armchair, Atsila curled up protectively in front of her.

“You good?” he croaks.

Fìrinn blinks at him. _Daemons should be seen and not heard_ ¸ Tetsuji says in his mind. _You will get her under control._

“Fìrinn. Say something.”

Wymack clears his throat, and Neil realises with a start that he is sitting on by his side, on a desk chair dragged through to the living room from his office so that Fìrinn could have the armchair to herself. “I can pretend I didn’t hear that.”

It takes Neil a moment to realise that Wymack is referring to Fìrinn’s name. After three weeks – two weeks? – of Jean and Riko barking her name at him whenever she stepped out of line, the caution he spent years placing on the syllables has been torn away.

“It’s fine,” Neil murmurs, the lie automatic. He has already exercised every ounce of fight he has on the subject.

“He sounds like Neil,” Wymack says, “but he doesn’t look like him.”

Neil’s gaze snaps to Fìrinn. She’s shaking, he now realises, and her eyes are fixed on the floor. It’s a kind of fear he hasn’t seen from her in nearly a decade, long before she took the form she now holds. Neil never forgot it.

“Why won’t you look at me?” he asks, his mouth dry enough to crack on the syllables. Fìrinn doesn’t answer, so he asks again, louder. “ _Why won’t you look at me?_ ”

When her voice does come, it is quieter than he has ever heard it. “You look exactly like him.”

“Like-?” Neil reaches for his hair, and his stomach rolls. The next few minutes are a blur as he staggers for the bathroom mirror, and he isn’t even sure if Fìrinn is following because there’s nothing but a hollow of numb, numb, numb where the tug of their bond usually lives, and then he sees his reflection, and then he sees the _number,_ and by the time he has come back to his senses he’s kneeling on the kitchen floor with a knife at his feet and Wymack is holding him as though he expects Neil to shatter like glass in his arms.

“Help me,” Neil says through gritted teeth.

“Let me,” Wymack replies. Atsila curls herself up by Neil’s feet, and she stays there, head on her paws and her tail moving in slow, sweeping movements until Neil’s heart rate returns to human speeds.

They watch the new year’s countdown on Wymack’s grainy TV set. It is the buzz of Neil’s phone that draws Fìrinn back to him at last, and she sits by his side, nose twitching, as Neil scrolls blearily through the Foxes’ texts.

Riko tore Neil to pieces again and again, did everything he could to break Neil, break his soul, break Fìrinn. She would never be the raven they wanted her to be, and neither would Neil, but that didn’t stop them from trying to force her into the same ridged obedience the other Ravens displayed. They did everything they could to tear the human-daemon bond to shreds so that they could build it back up again from scratch, and the truth is that Neil isn’t sure whether they succeeded or not. The numbness is terrifying, like the phantom ache of an amputated limb, and Neil doesn’t know if it will ever go away, if he will ever be able to feel anything again. In recent months, Fìrinn has become more and more difficult for him to read, but even those brief scraps and flashes of understanding have been torn to nothing.

So, Neil does something he has never done before. He asks.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” says Fìrinn, “that facing the Foxes on the court this Spring will be the last mistake Riko ever makes.”

A smile tears open across Neil’s face like a knife wound. Maybe there’s hope for them yet.

*

*

*

*

*

Andrew jolts awake. The digital clock on the otherwise bare bedside table reads _00:01_. The starch hospital sheets are sticky with his sweat. He was dreaming again. Nothing he remembers, but he’s sure Proust will badger him for details regardless.

It takes him a moment to realise what’s wrong. Or what’s right. What’s different.

The last of the drugs have left his system. Andrew is a sober man.

Movement catches his eye. Lexia is perched on the narrow windowsill, her tail tapping the glass as it sways. She hasn’t slept. She never sleeps while Andrew sleeps, although Easthaven is doing its best to cure them of the habit. _Unnatural_ , Proust called it. He seems particularly fond of that word.

In the moonlight, her patchy, pale skin seems almost white. Andrew can hear crashes and bangs in the distance, jubilant noises. New Year. New him. Didn’t time fly?

Lexia watches fireworks sparkle and pop through the painted-shut window for several minutes. Then, she turns to Andrew.

“So,” she says. “Are you ready to talk now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [A beautiful baby goblin video to brighten your day.](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com/post/623203543667671040/karmacharmeleon18-justcatposts-you-dont-have) Thank u karmacharmeleon18 <3


	19. To the Roof

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew returns from Easthaven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: discussion of Andrew's experiences in Easthaven and Neil & Kevin's experiences in the nest. Smoking. Reference to scars. Self-harmful behaviour.

Easthaven’s reception area is grim for all it pretends to be cheerful, plastic plants and plastic smiles and a lingering air freshener that doesn’t quite mask the clinical hospital smell. Neil sits on one side of the waiting area with Kevin by his side, time slowing to a crawl as they wait for Andrew’s arrival. They watch as Caith tries without success to coax Fìrinn out from beneath the seating opposite them. Neil is used to Fìrinn hiding from others, is used to shielding her from the eyes of the world for the sake of their survival, but it isn’t the world she’s hiding from now – it’s Neil. He doesn’t know how to help her without causing them both more damage. With the traumas of winter break still cutting through his skin, he isn’t sure how much more the pair of them can take.

“I know what he’s like,” Kevin says in quiet French. “If you want to talk.”

Neil watches as Caith stoops to nudge at Fìrinn’s side. Fìrinn drums her foot automatically in response.

“Caith isn’t like the other Raven daemons,” Neil answers.

Kevin flinches. He looks automatically to his injured hand. “She was already settled when I arrived at the nest.”

“I’m not talking about her form. I mean her behaviour. The other daemons in the nest, they were… rigid. Obedient.”

Kevin’s features slacken into a sudden, terrible blankness. “I remember.”

“How did…” Neil trails off for a moment, lost to memories of cruel hands and sharp voices and all-consuming pain. “How did you keep her from turning into… into that. Into them.”

“I didn’t.” Kevin’s eyes snap to Neil’s face, running over the bandaging covering his tattoo. “For ages after I left, it was… we were…” He gestures helplessly. “Being with the Foxes helped.”

“Yeah.” For the first time in what feels like forever, the beginnings of a smile twitch across Neil’s face. “I get that.” He pauses. “Wymack told me once that canine daemons run in his family.”

Kevin flinches again, violently. “Damn it, Jean,” he mutters.

“Maybe it means there’s hope for you yet.”

The conversation lulls as Kevin digests Neil’s words. Fìrinn peaks her head out from beneath the chair, but snaps back when Nicky’s daemon scampers past. The reunion with the upperclassmen had not been easy on her; Wymack warned the Foxes not to smother Neil, but there was no controlling the horrified reactions of their daemons. The daemons were used to Fìrinn’s twitchy behaviour, but it had been months since she had felt the need to shy away from any of them so frantically. When Reynala tried to approach her, Fìrinn shrank away on unsteady legs while Matt looked on, expression crumpling.

Whatever he expects from Andrew and Lexia, Neil breathes a little easier knowing that neither will crowd him and Fìrinn like the other Foxes did. All the same, anticipation swirls with anxiety in his gut as the door behind them opens.

Anything Neil planned on saying is lost to the sight of Andrew’s blank gaze. His stomach lurches as he searches for Lexia. She always liked to sneak around Andrew’s periphery, out of sight and under the radar, and Neil isn’t sure why he expects something different now, but he does. Andrew doesn’t react to Neil’s searching gaze, or to any of the monster’s expectant looks, stalking towards the exit. Lexia follows several paces behind at her usual disdainful distance. Andrew didn’t spare Neil’s changed appearance a second glance, but Lexia stops, stares, then peers around Neil in search of Fìrinn. A strange look of understanding passes between them, and for a moment the daemons are mirror images of one another. A deep bolt of horror shoots through Neil’s gut as he knows suddenly, surely, impossibly, terribly, that all the horrors Fìrinn was subjected to in the Nest were inflicted upon Lexia a hundredfold during Andrew’s stay in Easthaven.

Neil fights back his nausea to climb into the backseat behind Andrew, pushing back the black memories crowding in on him by fixing his gaze on the back of Andrew’s headrest.

In the passenger seat footwell, Caith drums her tail impatiently as she watches Lexia crawl into her spot under the driver’s seat. Neil suspects Caith is eager to get back to the court as soon as possible, to see if removing the haze of Andrew’s medication will change his attitude to the game. Maybe Kevin expects Lexia will join Andrew on the court instead of watching from the other side of the glass. He was always stubbornly optimistic where Andrew was concerned, and his conviction is unlikely to waver in the face of Andrew’s new blank exterior. Kevin promised Andrew something to build his life around, a foundation for Lexia and Andrew to build across the divide between them. Whether anything in their behaviour has changed since Andrew’s departure is irrelevant; Kevin plans to deliver regardless.

Once the monsters have been safely delivered to their dorm, Neil follows Andrew’s summons to the roof. The air is bitterly cold, and as he casts his eyes up to the grey sky above he almost trips over Lexia in the doorway. She is rooted to the spot, hackles raised as though she has spotted an enemy, although there is nothing but Andrew and the empty stretch of the roof ahead of them.

Andrew wanders over to the edge, peers over, turns back to them, and does something Neil has never seen him do willingly before.

He picks Lexia up.

It’s far from gentle; he holds her by the scruff of her neck with the same disinterest he would a sack of potatoes. It’s as he walks towards the edge of the roof that Lexia’s shock wears off and she begins to hiss and claw at Andrew’s arm. Neil bites back a sympathetic wince. The thick wool of Andrew’s jacket is protection enough against Lexia’s claws, but Neil remembers the rows of scarring he glimpsed after Andrew surrendered his armbands.

Andrew holds her out over the edge, and for a terrible, terrifying moment, Neil thinks Andrew is going to drop her. Fìrinn charges forwards, more driven than Neil has seen her since they left for the nest, but Andrew just stands there, staring as Lexia hangs over the drop. She has stopped struggling, clinging instead to Andrew’s arm for dear life, her eyes wide and fixed on him.

It takes Neil a moment to find his voice. “What the hell are you doing?!”

Andrew reacts neither to Neil nor his daemon’s distress, but there’s a new kind of tension in his posture. Neil realises after a beat that the tilt of Andrew’s head is analytical, although Neil isn’t sure what it is he’s testing.

Andrew’s gaze doesn’t shift when Fìrinn grinds to a halt by his feet, but the weight of Neil’s hand on his arm earns a flicker of attention. Neil pulls Andrew’s arm back with the barest hint of pressure, fingers wrapped loosely around his wrist until Lexia is no longer dangling over the edge. Her eyes fix on Neil’s hand as it moves across her field of vision until he relinquishes his hold on Andrew. As soon as she has the roof beneath her to break her fall, she returns to scrabbling in vain to escape Andrew’s hold.

“Enough, Andrew,” Neil says lowly.

“I didn’t take you for the squeamish type.”

“I’m not,” Neil concedes, “But someone has to look out for her.”

“She won’t thank you for it.”

“Andrew,” Neil says again. He doesn’t know if Andrew can feel his daemon’s panic, but it claws straight through Neil’s chest as though she were his own. Neil’s vision blackens, and for a moment he’s somewhere else, deep below the earth, watching helplessly as Fìrinn is-

Neil doesn’t know what he let slip in his expression, but something flickers behind Andrew’s eyes, the first sign of true feeling since they picked him up at Easthaven. He opens his grip and allows Lexia to drop. She lands between them and starts shuffling backwards from the edge of the roof with a furious hiss which Andrew ignores.

“I’ll take an explanation now.”

Neil explains, haltingly, how he came to spend Christmas in Evermore. Andrew’s gaze flicks occasionally in Fìrinn’s direction as though waiting for her usual interjections, but she remains silent, head bowed. The sight reminds Neil of standing behind his mother as she sweet-talked her way around one troublesome official or another, her instructions to _stay still, stay quiet, don’t attract attention_ echoing in his head while Mairidh glared at them from the hem of her collar. The Raven’s punishments seemed to be no less brutal whether Fìrinn made a fuss or not, but after weeks of torture the habits are hard to shake.

As soon as Neil has finished, Andrew peels back Neil’s plaster to examine his tattoo. Then he asks the question Neil least wants to answer.

“Why did you go?”

Neil fights back his nausea to answer, “Riko said if I didn’t, Doctor Proust would-”

Andrew clamps a hand over Neil’s mouth, confirming all of Neil’s worst suspicions in one heavy look. Beside him, Lexia twitches, claws scraping against the concrete. Before Christmas, Andrew would have laughed at her. Now he doesn’t care enough to do even that.

“Is it my turn for a question?” Neil asks when Andrew removes his hand.

Andrew huffs. He drops down on the edge of the roof, and when Neil mirrors the action, he picks Lexia up again and moves her to his other side. The precaution takes Neil’s mind somewhere bloody, and anger thaws some of the ice in his veins. He sits on his hands, partly to prove to Andrew that he poses no threat, partly to hide the tremors shuddering through them. In the nest, there had been no taboo; Ravens were happy to lay hands on other daemons if it meant breaking them in quicker. Andrew may know better than anyone the endless cruelty of humanity, but all the same Neil cannot stand the thought of being seen as that kind of threat.

“I won’t do anything to her,” Neil says, the injustice of such a promise being necessary weighing heavy on his tongue.

“It isn’t you I’m worried about,” Andrew says vaguely. “Ask your question.”

“You held Lexia over the roof because you were testing your bond with her. To see if coming off the drugs has changed anything between you.”

“I don’t hear a question.”

“Did you feel anything?”

It’s Andrew’s turn to go still. He accepts the cigarette that Neil offers him. “Fear,” he answers at last.

Neil nods, biting down on the surge of triumph Andrew’s answer sears through him. For months, the Foxes had called Andrew soulless, unfeeling, disconnected from his daemon. Finally, definitive proof of what Neil had known all along; that there was hope for Andrew and Lexia yet.

He watches as Andrew’s hands auto-pilot through the familiar motions of lighting up a cigarette. Lexia peers around Andrew to stare at Fìrinn until Andrew shoves her back with his spare hand.

“Your turn,” Neil replies.

“What did they do to her?” He gestures to Fìrinn, the glowing end of the cigarette dancing with the motion.

Neil drops his gaze. “What does it matter?”

“She isn’t speaking.” If Andrew sees the irony of his reasoning, he doesn’t show it.

“Didn’t Kevin tell you how the nest works already?”

Andrew takes a long drag from his cigarette. “I don’t hear an answer.”

Neil looks to Fìrinn. He wishes she would object, interject, fight or run or do _something_ , _anything_ ¸ but how can he blame her for her complacency after all that they did to her?

“Tetsuji believes that the key to perfect discipline is in perfect control over one’s daemon,” Neil says, reciting the explanation Jean gave him, tone dull and flat as though he were reading from a textbook. “Raven daemons are expected to follow their human’s wishes without comment, to be seen but never heard. If they can’t behave as they’re supposed to, the master breaks them.”

“And did he break you, _Fìrinn_?”

Weeks in the nest may have numbed Neil to the sound of his daemon’s name, but Andrew’s lips render it new once more. In two short syllables, Neil feels as though Andrew has reached into his chest, into somewhere deep and forgotten, untouched and painfully delicate, and it takes him a moment to catch his breath again.

Then, underneath, he feels it, the warm and familiar simmer of feeling in his chest. Fìrinn.

“No.” Her voice is strained from disuse, but all the more defiant for it. “I’m not a Raven.”

Without his meds, Andrew is more difficult to read than ever, even more so when he’s blocking Neil’s line of sight to Lexia. But, if Neil had to guess, he would describe the flicker in his eyes as something akin to victory. “Time to start acting like it.”

Neil plucks Andrew’s cigarette from between his fingers and holds it, watching the patterns the ribbon of smoke makes in the air. Andrew is too busy watching Neil to notice Lexia has crept back out from behind him until Fìrinn speaks again.

“Did they break _you_?”

Andrew snorts, and for a moment his dismissal seems to be the end of it. Then, from his side, a voice, quiet, steady, sure.

“No.”

Neil would think he had imagined the sound were it not for Andrew’s reaction. For a beat, all are silent, staring at Andrew’s daemon. She’s shivering a little in the bitter January air, but her gaze is steady, unaffected by their scrutiny. Neil feels as though he has been handed something precious, something delicate, and he doesn’t know how to be grateful when Andrew is staring down his daemon like he regrets not dropping her off the roof after all.

“Good,” says Neil quietly, and the spell is broken. He doesn’t know what has changed in Andrew’s absence – whether it’s the absence of drugs addling his system or something else that has urged his daemon to speak – but Neil isn’t going to press him for answers, nor his daemon for more than she has already offered.

Instead, he returns Andrew’s cigarette to him. Andrew holds it loosely in his fingers, a faint crease in his brow. He takes one last drag before flicking it over the roof. “I hate you. Go inside and leave me alone.”

“You still have my keys.”

Andrew pulls Neil’s keys from his pocket, frees his car key from the ring and drops the rest over the edge of the roof. “Not anymore.”

Andrew is still watching from the edge of the roof when Neil scoops them up from the car park asphalt below. Neil turns to see Fìrinn sniffing at Andrew’s smouldering cigarette, which landed a few feet from his keys, and in a moment of impulse he picks it up and sticks it between his lips. He tilts his head up and taps two fingers to his temple, an imitation of Andrew’s mocking salute.

Andrew’s lips move. The sound is lost to the wind, but Neil recognises the shape of the words anyway. _I hate him_.

Then a noise _does_ reach Neil, a strange, strangled wheeze which takes him a moment to identify.

Lexia is laughing.

Andrew says something else, harder to identify, and disappears from view. Neil lingers, enjoying the warm weight of the cigarette on his lips. Lit by the grey sky, sliced through by the winter chill, Neil has never felt further from the nest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lexia's laugh sounds like a vaccum cleaner with asthma I'm so sorry everyone


	20. Losing Control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil gets a makeover, Andrew takes a turn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So do y'all still remember me orrrrrrr
> 
> Content warnings: PTSD symptoms, dissociative episode, references to abuse, assault, self-harm

Allison holds the foundation samples against Neil’s skin, one after the other, searching for the tone which comes closest to matching him. Her face is pinched with barely-suppressed fury as she works on the bruises covering Neil’s face and throat. She’s careful in her movements, but the contact stings all the same, and Neil doesn’t do a good enough job hiding his pain. Allison may keep her temper, but her daemon doesn’t. He shuffles from foot to foot on his perch over the mirror, occasionally stopping to flap his wings, his feathers ruffling up to make him look twice his size. There were no red macaws in the Nest, but still Neil flinches back from the peripheral movement of wings. Allison slams a stick of concealer down on the dresser, and Neil fights back the urge to apologise.

“I can’t do this if you’re _shaking_ , Neil,” Allison snaps.

“I’m not,” Neil lies.

“Sure,” Allison says. Her daemon mutters a string of expletives, nipping at Allison’s fingers as she reaches for a brush.

“I’m not standing for this,” he says. His claws click as he hops across the dresser top, and Neil stops breathing, too close, too close-

He closes his eyes and braces for an attack that never comes.

Allison makes a choked off sound, as though she’s barely restraining herself from doing something loud or violent or both, and there’s a click as she puts the brush back down. He still can’t make himself open his eyes, can’t imagine what Fìrinn is doing in her hiding spot under the table or behind the couch or wherever else she burrowed herself away. He digs his teeth into his lower lip and waits for the feeling to pass.

A muted conversation takes place over his head, but the words are static to Neil’s ears. Then a radio clicks on, and music fills the room, a low, smooth melody that Neil’s breathing falls in time with. Allison’s daemon whistles along to a few bars, and then Neil opens his eyes, a smile tugging at his lips. The macaw is perched on the arm of the sofa, humming and clicking to the music as Fìrinn watches in fascination.

“Welcome back,” says Allison, and there’s still a low curl of frustration to her words, but one look from her daemon seems to end a fight before it can start. “You know we’re not going to hurt you, right?”

“I know. I know. It’s just…”

“Yeah,” Allison says, saving him from the end of the sentence. Her daemon stays on the couch with Fìrinn as she returns to working on Neil’s injuries, and soon he sinks into the rhythm of her touch as she seals over the cracks and the damage.

“I never told you his name,” Allison says, and for all her casual tone Neil can tell that she is choosing her words carefully, like one would trying to approach a feral street cat.

Neil shrugs, and winces at the twinge it sends through his shoulder. “You don’t have to-”

“Dramosus,” she says quickly, like she’s trying to pull out a tooth with as little pain as possible. “But I hate it. Too pretentious.”

“Suits him, then.”

Allison makes a face that is more for show than out of real irritation, and taps his nose with the end of the makeup brush. “Asshole.”

The next time Dramosus moves closer, fluttering up to perch on Allison’s shoulder, Neil doesn’t flinch. He studies Neil while Allison works, head tilted to one side, before finally saying, “He’ll pay for touching what’s ours.” Then, “A little more around the left eye.”

Neil smiles, and for the first time since returning from the nest it doesn’t feel like his chest is splitting open to manage it.

Eventually, Allison leans back to give him a scrutinising once-over before reaching for her mirror. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Fìrinn go still.

“If you say it’s good, I’ll believe you.”

“Not scared of Riko, but scared of your own face?” Allison crosses her arms over her chest, but when she sees the way Fìrinn is trying to dig her way back into the sofa cushions her expression softens into something closer to pity. “Change it back if your daemon hates it so much.”

Laughter echoes in Neil’s ears, sharp claws and sharper threats while the chemical hair-dye stench lay thick on his skin. “I can’t.”

“Well then you’re going to have to work something out. Because _this_ ,” she gestures between Neil and Fìrinn, “is going to get old quickly.”

Neil doesn’t bother explaining that _this_ has been a problem from the moment he signed Wymack’s contract. Neil and his daemon have been pushing and pulling each other in a battle of wills that with every struggle comes closer to tearing them apart. The nest, it seems, was the final nail in their coffin. With his father’s face perpetually looming over her, it’s no wonder Fìrinn hates him.

Something of his exhaustion must show in his features. Allison flips her tray of concealers shut with a click. “It doesn’t seem like you.”

“What?”

“Letting Riko win.”

Fìrinn starts at that, eyes narrowing. There’s a long beat of silence. “He isn’t.” She looks at Neil, and although it clearly pains her, she holds his gaze.

“Much better,” Dramosus hums. Neil gets the feeling he isn’t talking about the makeup.

The week drags itself towards its end, and with it comes a night in Columbia. None of the other monsters seem to have noticed any difference in Andrew’s daemon, and so Neil assumes that her quiet interjection on the roof was for his ears alone. In the stadium, she is as disinterested as ever, watching the Foxes play from the other side of the glass with only the faintest twitch to distinguish her from a statue. The memory of her low, scratchy voice, however, claws at the back of Neil’s mind, and he can’t help but follow Andrew’s daemon as she weaves between the legs of Eden’s patrons, scanning for any further change in her behaviour. Her disinterest – or the pretence of it – is shattered when a sparrow daemon zips between the table legs, startling Fìrinn. Lexia swats the daemon away with ferocious speed, eliciting a furious yelp from the daemon’s human. Neil tenses, preparing for trouble, but one look from Andrew has the partygoer walking away, muttering under his breath.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Neil says to her in quiet German, bending so that she can hear him over the noise. Aaron and Nicky are lost to the dance floor, but Kevin gives him a sidelong glance which Neil pointedly ignores. Lexia, predictably, stares back in response until Andrew yanks Neil’s head back above the table.

“What?” Neil says innocently. “Am I bothering her?”

“Nothing bothers her.”

“Nothing bothers _you_ ,” Neil corrects. “Because you keep your daemon at too much of a distance to feel her emotions.”

Andrew swirls the remainder of his drink around the bottom of the glass, as though finding it more interesting than Neil’s words, before swallowing in one gulp. “This is not news.”

“No. But something between you has changed, hasn’t it? You’re sober now. Something is getting through.”

“It isn’t your turn for a question.”

“Then take yours.”

Andrew runs his fingers along the edge of his glass, as though he has already forgotten emptying it. “What did they do to Fìrinn?”

Neil’s mouth goes dry. “I already told you.”

“You told me they tried to break her.”

“Wasn’t that enough?”

“No.” Andrew sets the glass back down.

“Why do you need to know?”

“Why do _you?”_

Neil is stuck. He doesn’t have an answer, or at least, not one he can put into words. His resignation comes out in a shuddery breath. The nightclub is suddenly too loud, alternating between too bright and too dark at headache-inducing speeds. He glances to Kevin, who seems far more interested in reaching the bottom of his drink than the German passing over his head. “Not here.”

“Later,” Andrew says, and it sounds like a promise.

Back at the house, they wait until the others are wrapped up in bed and meet on the front porch. Andrew arrives before Neil does, and smoke is already curling around him as Neil takes his place on the steps at his side. Neil expects Lexia to wander off into the long, unkempt grass of the front yard, or squirrel herself away under the car, but instead she sits before them, watching Neil expectantly. He looks to his daemon, but Fìrinn’s gaze is fixed on a point over their heads, a million miles away.

“There’s no taboo in the nest,” Neil begins, not wanting to force Andrew into repeating his question. “Ravens are supposed to be property, so it’s like… their souls don’t belong to them. They’re one team, one entity, and there are no boundaries, no…”

“No taboo,” Andrew repeats. Then, “They laid hands on Fìrinn.” Not a question.

“Proust broke the taboo too,” says Neil, and it isn’t a question either.

“He found Lexia’s behaviour _interesting_.” Andrew punctuates the sentence by grinding his cigarette into the decking. “He claimed he was trying to fix her, of course. Really, he was just looking for a reaction.”

Neil picks up the smouldering cigarette butt, resting it between his forefinger and thumb. It’s still warm from Andrew’s lips. “You’re going to kill him.”

“Naturally.” Andrew draws a second cigarette from the carton and lights it.

Neil looks to Lexia, who sheathes and unsheathes her claws in response. If it weren’t for the blankness of her expression, he would describe the clicking sound her claws made against the asphalt as playful.

“We can help with that,” Fìrinn says. Neil wishes she were joking.

“That’s what makes you so interesting.” Andrew raises his cigarette as if to take a drag, but hesitates, holding it a hair’s breadth from his lips. “How aggravating.”

“You’ve said that before.”

Andrew’s eyes don’t move from the cigarette. “You remembered.”

Something sharp and painful passes through Neil’s chest, there and gone in an instant. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he raises Andrew’s crumpled cigarette to his lips, and they breathe as one.

“Your turn,” Andrew says, and it takes Neil a moment to remember how they got here in the first place. After everything Andrew has offered him already, it feels cheap to ask for more, but Neil can tell that expressing such a sentiment would be met with a flat look from man and daemon alike.

“What has changed? Between you and Lexia?”

“We ended our deal.”

“Ended-” Neil starts, stops, starts again. “Your deal.”

Andrew flicks him an irritated look. “Did Riko break your ears too?”

“Not for lack of trying.”

They fall into silence while Neil contemplates Andrew’s words. He knows by now the meaning behind Andrew’s _deals_. They were a way to hold people close but never _too_ close, to tie himself to his family by something more than the blood they shared. Most of all, they were about control.

Andrew uses that same ruthless grip to keep his own soul in line. Neil wishes he were surprised.

“What was the deal?”

“Not your turn.”

“You gave me a half-answer, and you know it.”

“Greedy,” Andrew replies. His fingers are loose as Neil steals his second cigarette, proving his point. Lexia blinks as their hands brush against each other. They watch together as Neil raises the butt to his lips. “Lexia promised to keep quiet and keep her distance from me. In return, I promised not to die.”

“That’s not a deal,” says Neil, horror bleeding into his words. “That’s a hostage situation.”

Andrew doesn’t reply immediately, and for a moment Neil thinks the conversation is over. Then, “Feeling was killing me.”

Neil’s eyes drop against his will to Andrew’s armbands, and understanding dawns. Andrew had forced Lexia away because rejecting all feeling was the only way he could survive the horrors the world had inflicted on him. It was a need that Neil understood on a level deeper than blood and bone: the need to survive.

“But now your deal is over,” Neil says. “What changed?”

A scratchy sound somewhere between a hiss and a wheeze whistles from Lexia’s ribcage. Neil shivers as her laughter cuts through the night air. “Andrew has other reasons to live now. His threats are meaningless.”

“Shut up,” Andrew snaps.

“Why? Are you worried he’ll see you’re losing control?”

Andrew jerks forward; Neil doesn’t know what his intentions are, and doesn’t plan to find out. His hand flies out, blocking Andrew’s path before he can reach his daemon. Andrew freezes, staring down at Neil’s hand until Neil withdraws it.

“Protecting her does not endear you to me,” Andrew says lowly, “It will bring you nothing but scorn from me and from her.”

“I’m not looking for a reward,” Neil says, nonplussed. “I’m not looking for anything.”

“Oh, Neil. I thought you had sworn off lying to me.” Andrew plucks his cigarette back from Neil while his daemon laughs. He steps in close enough that Neil can smell the smoke on his clothes, see the faintest scruff of his five o’clock shadow. “My patience with your interference is going to wear out sooner or later.”

Fìrinn makes a disbelieving noise. She did not react to any of Andrew’s revelations with surprise save this one, almost as though she had heard it all before. Maybe, in a way, she has; her understanding of Lexia seems at times to border on telepathic. “Now who’s lying?”

Andrew takes a long drag of the cigarette, gaze flicking between Neil and his daemon. Neil has more questions, so many they threaten to spill from him like water breaking a dam, but it is no longer his turn, and he senses that Andrew is not planning on another round tonight. Instead he drops the cigarette and crouches, addressing Neil’s daemon directly.

“I promised you that no one would touch you again,” Andrew says lowly. It isn’t an apology, and Neil knows that Andrew doesn’t believe in regret; this is something deeper, angrier, and for a moment neither he nor Fìrinn know how to respond. Neil expects his daemon to crack under the strain of the wave of memories the words wash over them. Instead, she shuffles onto her back legs, standing tall.

“You didn’t break your promise. We made our choice, and we knew the risks.”

“We, or you?” Andrew says. His gaze flickers back up to Neil. “Don’t answer that. Waste of a turn.” He turns back to Fìrinn. “Throw yourself in the line of fire like that again and I’ll kill you myself.”

“Protecting her does not endear you to me,” Neil parrots. He isn’t sure if it’s Andrew he’s lying to or himself, but Andrew doesn’t bother calling him on it. He shivers, casts another irritated look at his daemon, and turns back towards the house. Andrew may be wearing his winter coat, but his daemon isn’t. Lexia’s skin is mottled with goosebumps, and Neil wonders if it’s her cold Andrew is feeling.

“Come on,” Andrew says over his shoulder. “You’ve caused enough trouble for one night.”

Neil doesn’t know if he’s talking to him or Lexia. Regardless, he follows Andrew back into the house, the night air sweeping cigarette ash away in their tracks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Allison's red macaw: Dramosus. From Drusus, meaning strong, and Animosus, meaning spirited, proud, brave. (Roman/Latin). Dramosus is also, coincidently, Lithuanian for dramatic. If the shoe fits...
> 
> Thank u @ana_quien for saving my life/ability to write this week with sphynx cat gifs and frogs <3


	21. Feeling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew loses control.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy shit this fic is a whole year old... all my love to yall for sticking with me so long <333
> 
> content warnings: dead animal, physical affection, violence, threats, death mention

The dead fox in the back of the car looks just like Azubuike, identical markings in the same auburn shades. The only difference is the eyes, glassy brown instead of bright green. Dan turns a terrible shade of grey as her eyes sweep across the wrangled corpse. Azu scrambles into her arms and she holds him in against her chest, pressing her face into his quivering fur as she takes deep breaths.

 _It’s not for you_ , Neil wants to say, but the words stick in his throat. The defiled cars are retaliation for his comments in the press, and while he alone may have prompted the attack, the Raven’s retaliation was directed at all of them. Thankfully, Matt is there to save Neil from any awkward attempts at comforting his captain, wrapping his arms around Dan so that her daemon is enveloped between them. He averts his eyes as Matt presses a kiss to the top of Azu’s head.

To no-one’s surprise, the monsters don’t handle the news of their ruined car well. Tempers running high, it’s only a matter of time before a fight breaks out. Allison backhands Aaron, and in the blink of an eye, Andrew has her pinned to the ground.

Appealing to Andrew’s better nature would be a waste of time, so Neil needs to find another way to get through to him. While Fìrinn circles Andrew and Allison with agitation twitching at her ears, Neil drops to one knee at Lexia’s side. She rose with a furious hiss the moment Aaron was struck, eyes on the panicked scrabble of movement under his collar, but once Andrew’s brother is out of harm’s way she watches with the same disinterest she would flickering images on a television screen.

“He’ll stop if you ask him to,” Neil whispers urgently.

“And why would I do that?” Lexia’s words carry an amused lilt that doesn’t fill Neil with confidence. Most of the others are too distracted by the brawl to notice their conversation, but Matt’s daemon peers through his legs, nose twitching.

“Without Allison, the Foxes are finished.”

“You should know better than to play on his interest in the team.”

Neil glances over his shoulder. The other athletes in the carpark are occupied with their own vehicles, but it’s only a matter of time before someone notices Allison pinned to the ground and tries to intervene. Neil doesn’t want to imagine what Andrew would do then.

“I’m not playing on your interest in the team. I’m playing on your interest in me. You can’t expect me to stay if you tear down everything I’m staying for.”

Lexia blinks slowly. Then she turns to Andrew, and Andrew drops his grip on Allison like it burns. The Foxes crowd round her as Andrew steps back, so they miss the expression that draws Andrew’s face taunt, a violin string about to snap. His hands are shaking like an addict in the aftermath of a hit as he looks from Lexia to Neil and back again.

Andrew’s eyes are dark with something raw and red and terrifying. It’s the first time Neil has seen something real beneath his blank mask since his return from Easthaven. That Lexia succeeded in reaching Andrew is a desperate relief, but the look he fixes her with has the hair on the back of Neil’s neck standing on end. It’s hard to say what exactly Lexia did to make Andrew pull pack, but Neil can feel it vibrating between them like a plucked string. A connection.

Andrew seizes Neil by the collar and yanks him close. “What did you _do?”_

“You’re feeling,” Fìrinn says breathlessly, as though oblivious to the fury being turned upon her human. “You’re really feeling.”

“Stop it,” Andrew hisses, the words coming out cracked like fissures in the Earth’s crust. Neil braces for an earthquake.

“I’m not doing anything.”

Most of the Foxes are still crowded around Allison, but their strident tones are beginning to draw attention. Andrew must hear the hush falling behind him, as his eyes flick away and he makes a decision.

Like water poured on hot coals, Andrew’s fury dissipates, drowned beneath his careful blankness. His hand still shakes as he relinquishes his grip on Neil’s collar, but neither of them acknowledge it. He turns on his heel and stalks away, leaving the others to handle the ruined vehicles.

Lexia flicks Neil a look before turning to Fìrinn. “We haven’t heard the last of this,” she says, baring her teeth as she follows in her human’s wake.

“Good,” Fìrinn answers. Neil can tell by the backward twitch of Lexia’s ears that she heard.

Once the police are finished with their enquiries and the disappointed athletes have dispersed, Neil finds Andrew on the roof, wrangling the neck of a bottle of vodka in his hand as though he wishes it were his daemon’s neck.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Andrew says as Neil and Fìrinn approach. He casts a disparaging look to his daemon, who is crouching by the door with her hackles raised. Apparently the memories of being dangled over the roof edge are a little too close for comfort. “Tell me, Neil, how do you stand it?”

“It?”

“Feeling.” Andrew holds his hand out between them, palm up, so they can both see the way it twitches. “How do you keep it under control?”

“I don’t,” Neil says, nonplussed. “You’re not supposed to hold it all in. You’re just supposed to feel it.”

They stare down at the car park, where a clean-up operation is well underway. “I hate you,” Andrew says, the terrible flatness of his voice undercutting his words. “And I hate her for giving into you.”

“Your deal with her ended. You can’t blame her for reaching out to you now.”

“Because _you_ asked her to.” Andrew flicks his pack of cigarettes at Neil. “Don’t think that you can put a leash on her to get to me.”

“It’s not a leash.” Neil reaches behind him, seeking Fìrinn’s warmth, but doesn’t find her where he expects. He looks over his shoulder to see her curled into a loaf at Lexia’s side. The daemons watch their humans with unblinking eyes. “It’s been so long since you’ve felt a connection with your daemon that you can no longer recognise it for what it is. You’re not leashed, you’re bonded.”

Andrew takes a swig from the bottle without breaking eye-contact with Neil. “Just because our deal ended doesn’t mean I have to listen to her.” He drops the bottle with a _clank_ and leans in close. Neil can smell the drink on his breath, an icy burn that matches Andrew’s gaze. “Use her against me again and I’ll kill you.”

“I’m not your enemy,” Neil says lowly, “and neither is she.”

“I hate you,” Andrew says again, and this time the burn in his eyes and his throat almost has Neil convinced. He tilts his head to one side, just a little, and for a moment Neil wonders how they would fit together if Andrew ever crossed the scant inch between them.

Andrew is wondering the same thing, and Neil can’t explain how he knows but he _does_ , and there’s something hot and thrumming in the air between them, another plucked string, strange and impossible, but Neil can see as deeply into Andrew’s soul as he can his own, and either there’s a mirror at the bottom of that well or Andrew is looking back.

“What-” Neil says, but Andrew’s hand clamps down on his mouth before he can finish. At first Neil thinks he has crossed a line, but then he realises Andrew’s attention is not on him.

Their daemons are no longer simply side-by-side but curled around each other, Fìrinn’s fur ruffled by the pressing wind as she rests her head on Lexia’s side.

 _When did that happen?_ Neil wants to ask, but even if Andrew’s hand wasn’t clamped over his mouth he doubts he could summon words anyway. His skin feels layers too thick for his body, overpowered by the warmth of something that isn’t his. Andrew’s hand twitches and moves away, taking some of the warmth with it, but Neil can still feel a part of him pressing in against his chest.

Then Andrew replaces his hand with his lips, and everything falls into place.

The burning sensation in Neil’s chest blossoms and spreads from his toes to his fingerprints, blood coursing through his body at twice its usual speed as though Andrew’s heart is beating in his chest alongside his own. It feels like being unravelled and sewn back together with every press of his lips.

Andrew pulls back, exhaling heavily as though trying to rid Neil from his lungs. “I’m not doing this.”

He stands. Neil should let it go, but the taste of Andrew’s lips is still buzzing on his skin and he needs to understand. “Why not?”

“The last time I let her take control, it nearly killed me.”

Neil casts a sideways glance at his daemon. The sphynx and the hare are still curled up together, and it’s hard to say where Neil’s daemon ends and Andrew’s begins. “I know the feeling.”

Andrew’s eyes are dark with understanding. He presses a thumb to his lip as though trying to erase the weight of Neil’s mouth. “Go away and take your daemon with you before I boot you both over the edge.”

“Go for it,” Neil says, a smile tugging at his lips. “But I think Fìrinn would drag Lexia over with her.”

“Two birds, one boot.”

“Okay,” Neil says. Fìrinn rises as he does, but Neil pauses by the door, where Lexia is blinking up at him with accusatory eyes, no longer shielded from the cold. “We haven’t heard the last of this,” he quotes.

She blinks slowly back, before turning her gaze back to her blank-faced human.

Neil leaves Andrew to his daemon’s scrutiny, hoping that he won’t make Lexia brave the cold much longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [A roast chicken sphynx cat for all ur roast chicken sphynx cat needs](https://twitter.com/thegallowboob/status/1342624620315336706) courtesy of Anna (vertigo) and Ana (gerifalte) <3
> 
> hey 40k words and FINALLY A KISS good work everyone

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading and please drop me a comment here or [on tumblr](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com) [and twitter.](https://twitter.com/darkblueboxs) Posts, asks, bonus content etc related to this fic are tagged #tsath


End file.
